Holiness and Desire
Jessica Martin
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.
Jessica Martin was formerly a Fellow in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is now a Canon of Ely Cathedral. She was a theological adviser to the Bishops’ working Party on Human Sexuality and is a member of the influential Littlemore group of theologians.