Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity is coming this October! It is the most personal book that I have written.
You can preview the introduction to the book and learn a bit more about my aims in this project, HERE on IVP’s website.
I will soon be sharing information about the Launch Team—an opportunity to read the book early and participate in an online discussion group with me that the publisher is organizing this fall! If this is of interest, stay tuned.
Anyway, today I invite you to check out the book excerpt, but also, I want to say a few things about the target audience I had in mind for this book.
Target audience? It’s complicated
Yes, this is a book about children and motherhood. But I didn’t write it just for mothers—and it’s definitely not the sort of book most children will want to read—not enough pictures, other than the cover. I wrote this book for every Christian who is worried about how our contemporary culture approaches issues of life. Men and women, whether parents or not, whether married or single. Because living in a society that doesn’t value people as image-bearers affects us all.
And so, this is a book about well-ordered anthropology—how thinking of every person as an image-bearer changes everything. I argue that our society’s modern post-Christian disdain for mothers and children is, really, a symptom of a disdain for human beings in general. I’m not arguing, in other words, that our society just has a problem with mothers or with children, or just has a problem with single cat ladies. I’m arguing, rather, that our society has a problem with people in general, which manifests the most obviously in how we treat the most vulnerable.
That is much more alarming.
And so, my desire is to recover a culture of life—a culture that unconditionally treasures all image-bearers. I argue that the disdain of human beings in the post-Christian world is remarkably akin to the devaluing of human life in the pre-Christian pagan world. It was Christianity that brought, for the first time in world history, the revolutionary idea that all people were priceless—not because of anything that they did or could do in the future, but because they are made in God’s image.
By the way, Priceless was the title that I had originally proposed for this book. I’m still just a little bit sad that this didn’t end up being the book’s final title, although I also do like the title that the IVP editors came up with. And I adore this book cover.
It is the most extraordinary thing about Christianity—that God delights in every single one of us. In today’s secular culture of despair and death, this good news is extraordinary and beautiful—but then, so it was in the ancient world.
This is a much- needed message in a culture that increasingly forgets just how much it owes to Christianity! Have you reached out to Louise Perry? I think this would be a great fit for her podcast.
An excellent introduction & posting. My wife & I are looking forward to the publication of your second book.