What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if it's in the gap between wanting and having that desire does the work which keeps us longing, yearning, hoping, burning, hungering, thirsting, calling, praying? A world that promises satisfaction is one that sells us imitations of our desires, and tempts us to settle for them.

This is the world in which we find ourselves, and Holiness and Desire is a wise and profound exploration of it, using the tools of Christian theology but also those of culture criticism, literary analysis and memoir. Here, the church's internal debates about sexuality are only one symptom of a larger unease over our whole relationship with desire.
We live in a world that prizes gratification of desire. But what if this pressure to satisfy our wants instead makes us settle for lesser imitations? What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions and the challenges they pose to modern living. Drawing on sources from the Bible to literature and social media, Jessica Martin considers what a distinctive holiness might look like within the distorting pressures of our highly sexualized modern culture.
We live in a world that prizes gratification of desire. But what if this pressure to satisfy our wants instead makes us settle for lesser imitations? What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions and the challenges they pose to modern living. Drawing on sources from the Bible to literature and social media, Jessica Martin considers what a distinctive holiness might look like within the distorting pressures of our highly sexualized modern culture.
We live in a world that prizes gratification of desire. But what if this pressure to satisfy our wants instead makes us settle for lesser imitations? What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions and the challenges they pose to modern living. Drawing on so