Mike King

Virginity Pledges linked to Risk

The current edition of Nation's Health (June/July 2005) has an article by Bill Smith who is the Vice President of Public Policy with the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.  The article is entitled, Virginity Pledges linked to risk.  I think this kind of data shows how ineffective the behavioral modification techniques that we use, in youth ministry and in the church, really are.  Manipulating kids into making commitments and thinking that we have accomplished spiritual formation is absurd.  The Holy Spirit alone generates authentic transformation and we can't manufacture that with shallow, safe, program-driven youth ministry tricks.

Download data_on_virginity_pledges_from_nations_health.pdf

Sex-positive celibates?

Go Lauren, you go girl...I really like Lauren and what she has to say. 

I got this in an e-mail update from The Revealer.  The Revealer is a publication of the New York University Department of Journalism and New York University's Center for Religion and Media.

Chastity is all the rage: NYT's Alex Williams falls all over chastity crusader Lauren F. Winner and her new book, Real Sex, in the paper's Fashion & Style section. "She wears retro cat's-eye glasses, has four tattoos, weaves references to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu into casual conversation and sips Côtes du Rhône over lunch." Williams goes on to count the ways in which Winner (an interesting writer, despite the evidence of this profile) is rocking the evangelical world because she talks openly about the fact that sex feels good. As Ms. Winner, an Orthodox Jew before she became an evangelical might say, oy. Evangelicals have been openly discussing sex for the last couple of decades. But The Times sees evangelicals as trendy, and it needs a movement diva -- a "personality" -- around which to re-organize the world. Secularists who have sex outside of marriage? So last year. Sex-positive celibates? Hot. To hell with journalism that asks a smart cookie like Winner some tough questions. The Times has found a new radical chic -- evangelical conservatism.

Read the full New York Times story

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