Religious Dispatches

Photo of Linda E. Cambe, who understands sexuality better than most people I know. Photo taken by Ted Michael Morgan.

A reply to an article on Carrie Prejean by Paula Cooey:

This is not a direct reaction to the article because I do not quite understand the article. The mysteries are still mysteries that facile expressions, debates, icons, and theories do not quite define or cover.

One of the first books I bought when I was becoming a young Christian was a little tract from Association Press. It was Seward Hiltner’s “Sex and Christian Life.” The tract was helpful as has been much theology I read during the next 61 years.

I own a large private library on romantic love, sexuality, theology, biblical studies—all part of my effort to understand his core part of myself in theological terms. I recall with gratitude the ministry of the Rev. Roland Perdue and later of the Rev. Milner Ball at Westminster House at the University of Georgia as well as the ministry of the Rev. Robert Burns, late pastor of Peachtree Christian Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The Methodist Churches sponsored major studies in human sexuality that influenced Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and the Cross Road Interfaith Bookstore in Portland, Oregon provided excellent resources that I enjoyed and celebrated. To boot, my marriage counselors were a Baptist pastor and a former Catholic priest who had taught pastoral care at a seminary. However, in many ways, the Church has not always been a healthy arena for me to explore sexuality.

Ambiguities abound, at least they do for me. With all the help from churches, scholars, and theologians, I found that my Christian identify confounded my sexuality. To explain would be too autobiographical for brief comment.

A complaint about Carrie Prejean and so-called beauty contests seems to pertain to how we make young women (and men) fetish items. We tend to limit our range of sexual expression to those who fit these fetish images or models. I recall young feminists including my first lover protesting this process of making fetishes out of young women even as my former lover enjoyed the fruits of representing a fetish image.

We still talk double-talk about sexuality. We still seem embarrassed to be sexual beings. At least, we still seem confused about what being sexual means. That is not to say that Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and Lawrence Durrell were any better or more helpful.

Professor Cooey is an important commentator on theology, feminism, and sexuality. Like me, I think she remains in awe of the mystery of embodied love and the mysteries that define being a human being.

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