As part of the on-going series, the links below will take you to current conversations about sexuality and relationships as well as issues related to the other three categories of holistic body theology: community, cultural discernment, and service.

Stay informed about what the world and the Church are saying so we can discuss the issues, discern healthy, holistic body theology, and discover God’s truth in the midst of many opinions.

Here’s this week’s installment.  Don’t be shy.  Share your thoughts in the comment section, or join the original conversations via the links provided.

1) Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook’s grown-up face “To solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality, we need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored,” she said.

2) See Me Naked Instead of dismissing at face value those who fall outside Christian moralistic expectation, Frykholm gives them opportunity to voice their own identity, which in every case reaches far beyond labels so easily foisted upon them in prejudice.

3) Gay Christians & Missional Integrity For gay friends, both Christian and otherwise (and a few straight Christian friends), to be gay means to be attracted to the same-sex. For most of my straight Christian friends, to be gay means to not only be attracted to the same-sex, but to affirm and participate in same-sex sexual relationships. So which is it?

4) Gay Christians Follow-Up [T]his is about the more fundamental question of how our experience of sexuality affects our personhood.

5) “Your gender is hardwired for whoredom” The way we (Christians in particular) talk about relationships with our young people may be sending them mixed messages with unintended consequences.

6) Pretty Packaging Sex sells because it’s packaged in pretty wrapping….I’m going to stop acting like sex is the greatest satisfier and pursue God.

7) Should I Marry a Man with Pornography Struggles? Wisdom means knowing where those weak points are, recognizing deception for what it is, and warring against ourselves in order to maintain fidelity to Christ and to those God has given us.

8) Obama, Religious Institutions, and Birth Control At issue here is violation of the beliefs of religious organizations that think birth control wrong; entailed as well is that some forms of contraception, now required by law to be provided to employees, violate other moral beliefs.

9) Hospitality, Economics, and the Suffering Church Jesus affirmed that follow[ing] Him would lead to a life in which the bondage of material wealth would be loosened and our commitment to generosity, simplicity and hospitality would lend itself to an economic place that was more likely to be humble than in abundance.

10) Lechery, Immodesty, and the Talmud It seems, then, that a religious tenet that begins with men’s sexual thoughts ends with men controlling women’s bodies.

11) The Woman Who Shelters New York City’s Trafficking Victims “It doesn’t matter how great law enforcement is, how great your laws are, how great your rate of rescue is,” Huckel said. “If you don’t have aftercare programs to deal with the women coming out, they’re just going to go right back in. “

12) Girls for Sale! Changing the Conversation on Exploited Kids in the US  The reality is that the vast majority of the girls who end up in the sex industry are coming from homes where there’s been sexual abuse, physical abuse, trauma and domestic violence.

13) Why Real Men Can’t Fix Everything We start caring so much about what others think of us, it actually begins to shape us…. It takes a toll – emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. We find ourselves in an identity crisis.

14) He Said, She Said: Driscoll’s “Real Marriage” is Really Not People are looking to their pastors to tell them what exactly they can do in bed once they’re married, and how to deal with intimacy issues throughout their entire married lives? This is a real problem, because the Bible isn’t a marriage handbook, and a seminary degree doesn’t train a pastor to be a sex therapist.

15) Sex, Marriage & Fairytales[sic] My hope in this poem is to highlight the most frequent and problematic issues marriages face today while also pointing to Jesus as the ultimate healer, redeemer, and restorer of every marriage.

16) Why Would a Scientist Believe the Virgin Birth? I believe that in the religion of the Incarnation the power of story fuses with the power of a true story, so that the great Christian myths are enacted myths.

17) Masculinity in the Movies Men of faith—studly, manly men—were everywhere on the big screen in 2011, ready to kick some butt and spill some blood.

18) Jesus and the Goodness of Everything Jesus, the revelation of God, is the prototype. He is the only one among us who faithfully and perfectly represents what God, the Creator, wished for the human person, created in his image, to be.

19) Evangelicals’ Mixed Messages for Women  [H]ow do each of us, men, women, boys and girls, keep our hearts and minds pure in a world that ignores and even devalues the concept of purity? And how do we do this when modern evangelicalism tells us that it has to do primarily with sexuality and then spends so much time talking about it?