Holiness and Desire

Immediately before and after summer school at Sarum College last week I read two books by Jessica Martin (a minister in the Church of England) about human identity and ministry.  The first was Holiness and Desire about what makes us who we are.  There is a focus on issues of human sexuality, but the book is wide-ranging and engages with many different elements of what it means to be human.  In our hyper-sexualised contemporary world, Martin explores the blurring of reality with ‘virtual reality’, especially in issues related to pornography.  The book challenges several of the positions the Church of England is currently taking on human sexuality, and calls out a number of double standards, especially in its attitudes towards homosexuality.  These criticisms allow Martin to take a broadly traditional ‘one person one partner’ approach to sexual morality while being much more open-minded and humane than the current position of the Church.  It is a very well written and extremely moving book. 

The second book was For God’s Sake: Re-imagining Priesthood and Prayer in a Changing Church (co-edited with Sarah Coakley).  This comes out of discussions of the Littlewood Group of practicing theologians (mostly, it seems from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England).  It looks at a variety of Church offices, including baptism, marriage, and funerals, and well as priestly ministry more generally.  Jessica Martin’s chapter on daily prayer is particularly good.  This is a good book to come back to as a study and experience these different offices.