Dirt, Greed and Sex: Revised Edition

Another new one from Fortress (with apologies for slight delay in posting):
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Desire, Purity, and Pollution — New Testament Sexual Ethics in Context

Minneapolis (November 14, 2007)—One of the most urgent tasks in contemporary discussions and controversies over sexuality, in churches and in wider society, is to put the biblical resources into their proper social and cultural contexts.

In Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today, Revised Edition, L. William Countryman accomplishes this task in an exemplary way, showing how biblical conceptions regarding proper sexual behavior arose from concerns for purity and from cultures in which women and children were often conceived as property. What biblical texts say about sex often arises from concerns about dirt and greed.

This new revised edition, of the landmark 1988 text, includes updated text and notes throughout, taking advantage of recent studies of sexual ethics and, where, appropriate, criticizing them. A new chapter evaluates recent proposals for a normative “ethic of creation,” and in a concluding chapter Countryman offers his own positive statement of a New Testament ethic. The result is an invaluable resource for anyone who seeks to understand what the New Testament says about sex.

Contents:

Preface and Introduction

Part 1: Dirt

1. What is Purity

2. Israel’s Basic Purity Law

3. Purity in First-Century Judaism

4. Purity and Christianity—a First-Century Historian’s Interpretation

5. Purity in the Gospels

6. Paul and Purity

7. The New Testament and Sexual Purity

Part 2: Greed

8. Women and Children as Property in the Ancient Mediterranean World

9. Household and Sexual Property in the Gospels

10. Paul and Sexual Property

11. The New Testament on Sexual Property

Part 3: Sex

12. Are Other Principles of Sexual Ethics at Work in the New Testament?

13. New Testament Sexual Ethics and Today’s World

Bibliography and Indexes

Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today,
Revised Edition

By L. William Countryman

Item No: 978-0-8006-6224-0

Format: Paperback, 350 pages, 6 x 9 inches

Price: $18.00

To order Dirt, Greed, and Sex please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the Web site at www.fortresspress.com.

To request review copies (for media), or to discuss speaking engagements or interviews, please call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234 or e-mail toddb@augsburgfortress.org.

To request exam copies for classroom use (professors) go to www.fortresspress.com/examcopy.
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