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Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition - How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure (Paperback, Updated Edition)
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Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition - How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure (Paperback, Updated Edition)
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Though they disagree on virtually everything else, evangelicals and
gays, Catholics and agnostics all agree that sex should be innocent
and ecstatic. For most of Western history people have not had such
expectations. Innocent Ecstasy shows how Christianity led Americans
to hope for so much from sex. The book explains how the sexual
revolution could have occurred in a nation so deeply imbued with
Christian ethical values. Tracing our strange journey from the
hands of Jonathan Edward's angry Puritan God to the loving embrace
of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman, Gardella draws his surprising
evidence from widely disparate sources, ranging from Catholic
confessionals to methodist revival meetings, from evangelical
romances to The Song of Bernadette. He reveals the sexual messages
of mainstream Protestant theology and the religious aspirations of
medical texts found at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. He
sheds new light on such well-known figures as Henry Adams, Margaret
Sanger, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
introduces us to such fascinating, lesser-known characters as Dr.
John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, inventors of corn flakes
and Graham crackers, who devised their products as
anti-aphrodisiacs. While detailing the development of moral
obligations to pursue sexual pleasure and to follow certain
patterns of sexual practice, Gardella incidentally provides one of
the few books to bring together the liberal Protestant, Roman
Catholic, and evangelical perspectives on any aspect of American
culture. Gardella attributes the American ethic of sexual pleasure
to the eagerness of Americans to overcome original sin. This led to
a quest for perfection, or complete freedom from guilt, combined
with a quest for ecstatic experience. The result, he maintains, is
an attitude that looks to sex for what was once expected from
religion. In this new edition, a new conclusion explores how
popular music, gay liberation, and recovery from sexual abuse have
substantially expanded innocent ecstasy during the past thirty
years while continuing the Christian themes of redemption and
mission. A new afterword deals with contemporary developments in
popular culture and offers thoughts about the future
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