Review: "Shameless" by Nadia Bolz-Weber

 

Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Published January 2019 via Convergent Books
★★★★

So—I'm not the intended audience for this book. The intended audience grew up in a fairly conservative church, probably, and received sex ed along the lines of "if you have sex outside of marriage, you'll catch an STD and die, and then you'll go to hell for it." I grew up in an areligious family, and the sex ed I got was more along the lines of "if you have sex, use a condom because you don't want to be a teenage parent or have to deal with an STD." (Well. Mostly. I had a very strange amalgamation of sex ed classes, but that was the upshot.)

But...having read a fair amount, recently, about the ways in which so many churches teach people (but especially women) to distrust their own bodies and own experiences, it was something of a relief to read an antidote to that. This book does have a specific audience, I think: people who grew up with a specific type of church teaching around sex and "purity," yes, but also people who have stepped away from that sort of church/teaching enough to be able to say "hang it all, I'm keeping only the parts that work for me." It won't sit well with everyone, but it feels like a very necessary different—and far more compassionate—perspective.

Alas, though, I am now out of Nadia Bolz-Weber books to read, because I still don't have a copy of Salvation on the Small Screen. But it's been more than three years since her last book, so surely a new one is due soon...?