When I'm reading theological blogs about sexuality or the body, I'm struck by the absence of any real analysis of the way technology frames our experience. I mean "technology" in a thin sense - money is a sort of technology; as is the birth control pill, as is a clean water supply.
The Roman Catholic church and Conservative Evangelicals do have something right: the pill and evolution are dangerous to a particular form of religiosity. To believe that people have sex because it is recreative rather than procreative may undermine our commitments to each other and to our children. To accept that we evolve could imply we are helpless and dead.
Yet, it is still a matter of faith that we must create meaning and imagine futures; that our sexuality requires public accountability; that intrinsic beauty exists - we praise and thank God for his own sake. This does not mean we need to deny that evolution and the pill are contemporary realities that liberate us from the world of the bible. Righteousness and sin have not changed.
On these things the religious are right.
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