The Unclad Soul

I recently posted on Facebook an article from the Houston Chronicle about sexual abuse and sexual harassment from ministers within the Southern Baptist Convention. The author provided solid research that spanned the last 20 years involving pastors, youth workers, deacons, and volunteers within local SBC churches who sexually used, abused, or assaulted teens and women in their congregations. We have seen how pervasive this problem has been within the Catholic Church, but the truth is, it has been going on for years in churches across all denominations. Ministers have easy access to vulnerable teens both male and female, and, to women in their churches. Some come for counseling and end up in some sexual relationship with a pastor or youth minister. Church leaders are often so revered they are considered above reproach and this can create manipulation and taking advantage of a person’s trust by them. It is something some morally weak ministers fall into, and, something unscrupulo...

What would we be like if the Garden of Eden story had ended differently? What if there was no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to stay away from? Or, what if it had been perfectly fine to eat the fruit of that tree so that the first humans could learn all of the good stuff? The author of Genesis, supposedly Moses, was apparently doing his best to explain evil and suffering in the world. It's a shame he couldn't just say we aren't finished yet. The idea that we are born to be bad, to do evil, to sin, is so limiting to the human spirit. Do we do bad things because we learned from the beginning that we are bad? What if we had been told how beautiful we are, how gifted and intelligent, and how capable we are of doing good? Whatever else was going on in the author's world or life at the time of writing Genesis, surely it wasn't all horror and depravity and calamity. And if it wasn't, then where did that goodness come from? And how did telling us we a...