I have plans to return to the issue of homosexuality sometime soon to affirm Ross’s excellent clarification, address Jan’s excellent query, and to try to respond to a few comments.
But the past few days, my thoughts have been consumed by issues surrounding body piercings and tattoos. In case you haven’t heard, they are a big deal among younger evangelicals (40% of us have ’em), and traditional evangelicals–demonstrating, as they tend to do, an acute ability to be about 10 years too late–have started to rethink them.
I’m n9t going to put all my cards out on the table. You’ll have to wait for the book for that.
But I will say this: Kevin Van Hoozer, who is very smart, thinks body piercing (and, I’m guessing, by extension tattoos) can be read as one way in which the contentious phenomenon known as “post-modernism” has made its way down into pop culture. I quote:
“Body piercing can be viewed as an attempt to “write the meaning” of the body over and above its biology. One’s body and one’s self-identity are viewed as aesthetic projects, undetermined phenomena that invite further construction, not just passive reception. There is apparently some satisfaction in the feeling that one has a degree of power over the project of constructing one’s identity.”
Van Hoozer writes like a parent bemused by what all the kids are up to (“apparently some satisfaction”). And that’s a tad amusing in itself.
But I’m curious to hear from you, oh reader: Did you get a tattoo or additional piercings, and why?
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
