I saw this one a while back and never got around to posting it. Christianity today writes up a blog post on a study by Mark Regnerus, suggesting that “Porn Predicts Same-Sex Marriage Support”. As they quote Regnerus from another article he posted:

But of the men who view pornographic material “every day or almost every day,” 54 percent “strongly agreed” that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that. Statistical tests confirmed that porn use is a (very) significant predictor of men’s support for same-sex marriage, even after controlling for other obvious factors that might influence one’s perspective, such as political affiliation, religiosity, marital status, age, education, and sexual orientation.

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this seem to belong in the category we might label “duh”? Read on, intrepid explorer →

Time for something unusual: a three-way book review. I’ve just finished reading James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World, N. D. Wilson’s Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl, and Andy Crouch’s Culture Making.

At least in my circles, there has been considerable hubbub over each of these books in their own ways in the last few years. Hunter’s volume is the most academic and the most far-reaching in its coverage of late modern Christianity, Wilson’s far and away the most playfully provocative, and Crouch’s the book in the middle. All three seek to cast a vision of engagement with reality, and all three share much of the same discontent with current Christian approaches to the world around us.

The flavors are unmistakably different, of course. Read on, intrepid explorer →

In an interesting piece in The Atlantic last week (“Life Without Sex: The Third Phase of the Asexuality Movement”), Rachel Hill highlighted David Jay and his organization, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network:

But what all asexual people have in common — and what defines asexuality as an orientation — is that, while they may have a desire to connect with other people, asexuals have no desire to connect with them sexually. Asexual people are not the same as celibate people: it’s not that they are purposefully or unintentionally abstaining from sex they would otherwise like to have, but rather that they have no interest in it.

The article is fascinating on several levels: its examination of asexuality as a “sexual orientation,” its exploration of the idea that for some people, sex just isn’t that important (however odd that may seem in our society), and its recognition that a sex-defined culture is perhaps not always beneficial. Read on, intrepid explorer →