Joseph Smith helps Christians to be discerning about unsavory material. He presents a carefully organized, elegant catalog of Scriptures own graphic passages, clarifying meanings often obscured by time or translation.

"At least one in six men have experienced some form of sexual violence. The Bible and Sexual Violence Against Men argues that the shame and stigma around male sexual abuse are interwoven with contemporary social and cultural concepts of masculinity, and are also found in the ancient world and biblical texts themselves. This book is interdisciplinary and has three main areas of exploration: Men Too? Exploring the myths around sexual violence against men sexual violence against men in the Hebrew Bible reading Jesus' enforced nudity at the crucifixion as sexual violence. Given the enduring importance of the Bible in contemporary society, this book explores the biblical texts that depict sexual violence against men. It examines critical approaches from theology, biblical and religious studies perspectives, while also exploring insights from the fields of sociology, psychology, criminology as well as referring to legal cases and legislation, charity work and media focussed articles. In seeking to serve a number of interested readers, including those who are not familiar with the Bible, short summaries of the biblical texts under discussion are given in each case"--

"It is widely recognized that the Hebrew Bible is filled with rape and sexual violence. However, feminist approaches to the topic remain dominated by Phyllis Trible's 1984 Texts of Terror, which describes feminist criticism as a practice of "telling sad stories." Pushing beyond Trible, Texts after Terror offers a new framework for reading biblical sexual violence, one that draws on recent work in feminist, queer, and affect theory and activism against sexual violence and rape culture. In the Hebrew Bible as in the contemporary world, sexual violence is frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy names the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy identifies the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Building on these concepts, Texts after Terror offers a number of new feminist strategies and approaches to sexual violence: critiquing the framework of consent, offering new models of sexual harm, emphasizing the importance of relationships between women (even in the context of stories of heterosexual rape), reading biblical rape texts with and through contemporary texts written by survivors, advocating for "unhappy reading" that makes unhappiness and open-endedness into key feminist sites of possibility. Texts after Terror also discusses a wide range of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 43), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Lot's daughters (Gen. 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1 and 2), and the Levite's concubine (Judg. 19)"--

The God of the Old Testament can shock readers of the Bible: he drowns his creation in the flood, requires Abraham to sacrifice his son, destroys the first-born of the Egyptians the night before the exodus, and ruthlessly eliminates the Israelites who were devoted to the worship of the golden calf. Throughout the centuries, many Christians and philosophers have rejected all or part of the Old Testament because of these divine characteristics that violently contrast with the image of the good and kind God of the New Testament. So can we believe in a God who is macho, cruel, despotic, or who even indulges in ethnic cleansing? Thomas Römer puts forward a reinterpretation of these difficult passages in the light of the most recent research into the Old Testament. For the author, the characteristics that God appears to have, and that at first seem repulsive, are aimed at preserving the faith from dogmatic complacency by instilling in mankind the unexpected vision of a God who is engaged with the real life of humanity. This work is a widely revised and augmented reissue of the older version that was published in 1996. It includes a new chapter: Is God sanctimonious and are human beings sinners? Book jacket.

"Christians needn't be any more squeamish than the Bible itself is and it contains many things that most Christians shy away from! In this carefully organized catalog of sexual, violent, and other blunt biblical passages, Joseph Smith develops a "Christian aesthetic" to help us process our culture's daily deluge of such material."--Publisher description.

Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts examines instances of sexual violence within a diversity of early Christian texts carefully, ethically, and with an eye toward shining a light on the scourge of sexual violence that is so often manifest in both ancient and contemporary Christian communities.