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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
'Illuminating, challenging and liberating - a vital part of the conversation about the way we live now.' -- Sarah Perry, prizewinning author of The Essex Serpent.
'The weaving together of scholarship, personal narrative, history and scripture is a faithful, needed and ultimately redemptive offering to us all.' -- Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of New York Times bestseller Shameless
'This book knocks right through the various 'official stories' which we tell ourselves, inside and outside churches. Reading it strengthens my feeling that the decline of Christendom has opened the way for a remarkable flowering of new avenues towards the faith'. -- Charles Taylor, Templeton prizewinner and author of A Secular Age
'Profound yet simple; robust yet vulnerable. Reading it is like reflecting on life and one's own story in front of an amazing piece of art'. -- Rachel Treweek



Book Information
ISBN 9781786221261
Author Jessica Martin
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Canterbury Press Norwich
Publisher Canterbury Press Norwich