Experts from a variety of fields join forces to show what fuels a most horrific violation of trust--sexual abuse by priests--and how the Church and church structure play a role in this abuse. This riveting work includes chapters by a former Director of the premiere U.S. facility treating clergy who are sexual offenders, by a Jesuit psychologist who authored the largest study of clergy sexual abusers ever completed, and from a Vatican Correspondent explaining the issues as seen by the Vatican. The text also includes an opening chapter by Michael Rezendes, a Boston Globe investigative...

What is the Bible's stance on such controversial issues as homosexuality and polygamy? What does it have to say about sexual behaviors that some would deem perverted or criminal? Is sex always wrong if it is not used to create life?

Ellens answers these and other questions in a book that argues that our understanding of what the Bible has to say about sex is frequently misguided. He corrects our impressions with a look at the Scriptures themselves, considers what they might have meant to people in the past, and reflects on how we understand, or misunderstand, them today. Focusing on...

Sex sells, they say, but even today, it is considered forbidden, wrong, or sinful by many in the Western world. This book is an account of the strange ways sexual pleasure has been devalued, even demonized, in the West by the forces of Christendom and its legacy in the modern world. It tells the story of how sex came to be regarded by societies throughout the ages as perverse, sinful, and wrong, and how the motivations of a few have lasted centuries and colored our view of sex and sexuality even today.

Sex sells, they say, but even today it is considered forbidden or sinful by...

Today most people feel less interested in religion and more interested in spirituality. If you ask what they mean, they will tell you that organized religion tends to turn them off, but, nonetheless, they feel a hunger in the heart that they cannot seem to fill. They do not mean that they would rather have disorganized religion; they mean that institutional religion does not seem to satisfy their spirits and feel there must be something more, some better way of experiencing whatever that is for which they are hungry. Much new experimentation is going on as a result. Some of it is a search...

Whether they fly airplanes into the World Trade Center or Pentagon; blow up ships, ports, and federal buildings, kill doctors and nurses at abortion clinics, exterminate contemporary Palestinians, or kill Israeli soldiers with suicide bombs, destructive religionists are all shaped by the same unconscious apocalyptic metaphors, and by the divine example and imperative to violence. In this condensed edition of a multivolume set covering how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all incorporate core metaphors that can spur violence, experts explain religious notions that fuel terrorism and other...

Richard Sipe, himself a former monk and priest, has made a lifelong venture of determining the reality and meaning of religious celibacy. Even an adequate operational definition of religious celibacy, he says, has been avoided by Catholic hierarchy and scholars to preserve the celibate myth. Having spent 25 years conducting a study of celibacy and sexual behavior in Roman Catholic priests, Sipe concluded that at any one time no more than 50 percent of priests were practicing celibacy. To more fully understand what celibacy is, how it is practiced, the affect it has on the humanness of men...

The esteemed editor who brought us the acclaimed set "The Destructive Power of Religion," turns his attention here to a similarly powerful, yet positive side of religion: how our concept of God can fuel healthy body and mind. This book contends that all health--mental and physical--is shaped, for good or ill, by our spiritual, theological, and psychological notions about the nature of God, and by the way we form an outlook on life as a result of these notions. Across history, a large percentage of people have believed that God is a threat, an attitude Ellens describes as sick gods created...

In the post-9/11 moments, months, and years, America has come to develop a new mortality awareness. Death, and our understanding that it can be sudden and is certainly inevitable, is being talked about more than ever before. As the team in this volume shows through groundbreaking research, surveys, interviews, and vignettes, death awareness has grown strong, and has changed the way we think and act, not only in relation to ourselves and our loved ones, but in relation to society overall. Those changes include nuances from increases in the number and size of college courses focused on...

This book describes the psychospiritual facts of life about the pervasiveness of sexuality in all aspects of human life. The energy developed by our libido is the dynamic source of all the forces that shape our experience, life, motives, thought, feelings, desires, and spiritual longings. No facet of life is untouched or unshaped by this dynamo. Whether we are sitting in church at worship, in a meeting for business, in a party for pleasure, we are always aware of the gender of those who are around us and of their level of sensuality, as it impacts us. If we are not aware of that, some...

It is not possible to recreate a "biblical" family in the modern world. Thus, we must think of the principles of faithful family life demonstrated in the Bible and express them in a new way. That is the idea underlying "Families of the Bible: A New Perspective." Examining themes related to family health, connection, spirituality, and psychology, the author relates stories from the Bible to modern-day experience in an effort to help readers strengthen and heal their own families, whatever their structure.

While the book addresses the family of the patriarchs and other major traditional...