Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

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Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too.

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Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

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What counts as change in the ex-gay context often looks quite different from what cultural outsiders might expect. A recent NPR story left out the fact that Wyler was married and had children at the time of his conversion therapy, not a single gay man living in L.A. making a rational decision between gay life and religious and family life, as the story depicted. It is not surprising that a fourteen-year marriage would be a strong pull toward resolving an identity clash in favor of existing commitments—especially when those commitments are seen as reflections of God’s will.

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