The Lust of the Flesh, by Jared Moore
Back in 2003, I wrote a piece for the Illinois Baptist that was picked up by Baptist Press. It stemmed from discussions I'd had with some British writers in the wake of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s nomination of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading in the Oxford Diocese. (Amidst the uproar, the nomination was withdrawn—or John withdrew from it, as the rival story is told.)
A year or so later at a Southern Seminary gathering after an evening session of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jared Moore introduced himself and expressed appreciation for my column. He’d been thinking along the same lines, and we began to talk, leading to his work on a dissertation, for which I was the advisor. In due course, he received the PhD, and he’s continued to address this issue, as in this book. Here’s what I wrote for the back cover, where my blurb appears alongside that of Rosaria Butterfield, once a practicing lesbian who was converted while a professor at Syracuse University. Her disavowal of her previous convictions on sexuality has played a strong role in the resistance movement against the normalization of homosexuality.
I’d been hearing, even from Evangelicals, that it was okay to be gay as long as you didn’t do gay. That notion seemed odd, indeed sub-Christian, for the logic implied that it was also okay to be pedophilic at heart as long as you didn’t act upon it. I was delighted to discover that Jared Moore was well down the way in sorting this out, and I was privileged to track with him as he wrote the dissertation from which this bold, biblically-meticulous book derives.