Prof. Adrian Thatcher

www.AdrianThatcher.org

Recent Books

Vile Bodies: The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith, and Practice
Vile Bodies are bodies that have been vilified by Christian thought, often with catastrophic consequences. The bodies of women, Jews, Muslims, slaves, Blacks, LGBT people, children, wives have all been harmed by negative Christian teaching about bodies. The book sidesteps the endless controversies in the churches about sexuality and gender and goes ... Read More...

Gender and Christian Ethics
I was four years working on this book, due to be published on September 30th, 2020. As a free-standing follow-up to Redeeming Gender, I’m now offering fresh theological arguments for expanding our understanding of gender in the church and in the world. ‘Gender’ is about relations between women and men. It is also about human identity, and about ... Read More...

Redeeming Gender
Redeeming Gender (Oxford University Press) was published in July 2016. It is a scholarly but very accessible monograph which argues that the problems about sexuality which continue to sap the churches� energies are really about gender. The dominant understanding of women�s bodies in the Christian West has been that they are inferior versions of ... Read More...

Thinking About Sex
Thinking About Sex is a re-issue of my Making Sense of Sex (SPCK 2012) for readers in North America. It was published by Fortress Press in December 2015, and priced at $14.00. Read More...

The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality and Gender
This volume is the culmination of three and a half year's work. I first produced a design, in 2011, for a volume of essays, over forty of them, which I thought would provide summaries of the latest research in all the areas contributing to contemporary theological thinking about sexuality. It soon became clear that the problem of gender lay beneath many of ... Read More...

Making Sense of Sex
Even after God, Sex and Gender (Wiley-Blackwell: 2011) there are still new things to say about all three. The same old tired arguments rumble on about male authority, women bishops, gay marriages, and so on, with little or no consideration of the new scholarship provided by classicists and medical historians, as well as biblical and doctrinal ... Read More...

God, Sex and Gender - An Introduction
This is my new book, released by Wiley-Blackwell on 8th April, 2011. Do follow the link to Amazon to see what the back cover blurb says. It has taken nearly three years to write. I try to reflect, positively, critically, and theologically, on the vast changes (all during my lifetime) to the understanding of our bodies and our sexuality; to the ... Read More...

The Savage Text: The Uses and Abuses of the Bible
Misuse of the Bible has made hatred holy. In this provocative book I argue that debates on sexuality currently raging through the churches are the latest outbreak in a long line of savage interpretations of the Bible. I claim they should be exposed, not least because they continue an anti-tradition in Christianity that has discriminated against many ... Read More...

Theology and Families
About half of children born in the UK are born outside marriage. My earlier work on marriage led me inevitably to thinking about how theology should respond to the diversity of family forms which has become increasingly evident. And my concern about the neglect of children in theology led me (in 2003) to begin a theological work where children are central to ... Read More...

The Guide to Christian Marriage and to getting married in church
My Daily Telegraph Guide to Christian Marriage (2003) was sold principally to mail order readers of that old Tory organ, and there were some left over. In 2006, the Publisher, Continuum, put a new cover on the older book, re-issued it, and hey presto, it quickly sold out. The older date, 2003, remains uncorrected on an early page. The Publishers never told me ... Read More...

The Daily Telegraph Guide to Christian Marriage and to getting married in church
How did I ever get to write for this reactionary Tory broadsheet? Good question! Here's the answer: I am a strong supporter of marriage, and writing a Guide on how you get married, and what it all means, appealed to me. They invited me to write it. I accepted. The back cover says 'The Daily Telegraph Guide to Christian Marriage is essential reading for ... Read More...

Living Together and Christian Ethics
I wrote Living Together and Christian Ethics in 2002, three years after Marriage after Modernity. The 1990s had seen a big rise in living together, and while I was writing Marriage and Modernity, I became aware that for most of Christian history getting married was a different process from that which is practised today. I began to see that retrieving this ... Read More...

Celebrating Christian Marriage
I'm very proud of this one! In June 2000 Caroline Major, who was my administrator in The Centre for Christian Theology and Education at The College of St Mark & St John, Plymouth, and I ran an international conference on marriage. It was just after my book Marriage after Modernity was published, and we wanted to build on the success of that work and establish ... Read More...

Christian Perspectives for Education
In the 1980s I was one of a few theologians who called for, and tried to contribute to, a 'theology of education'. The subject of education was then divided into the sociology, psychology, philosophy and history of education. We surmised (wrongly as it turned out) that Church Colleges, all of whom had a stake in education and in 'Church-relatedness', would ... Read More...

Spirituality and the Curriculum
The 1988 Education Reform Act made clear the responsibility of schools for the 'spiritual development' of children, and generated a flurry of speculation about what spirituality was. This book is a collection of thirteen essays which attempted a Christian theological contribution to that discussion. Read More...

Marriage after Modernity - Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times
Marriage after Modernity was published by Sheffield Academic Press, now part of Continuum, and by New York University Press in 1999. I tried to offer a new vision for Christian marriage at a time of unprecedented social and theological change. The book breaks new ground in drawing on earlier traditions of betrothal and informal marriage in welcoming some ... Read More...

People of Passion - what the churches teach about sex
People of Passion came four years after Liberating Sex - A Christian Sexual Theology. Elizabeth Stuart, my co-author, and I, had both contributed to the open discussion of sexual questions within theology in the early 1990s, and we hoped this volume would widen the readership interested in these questions still further. The title of the book was an ... Read More...

Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender
was published by Gracewing in Britain and Eerdmans in the United States. Elizabeth Stuart (my co-editor) and I wanted to make available in a single volume some of the excellent articles we had found when working on other books, with undergraduate classes on Theology and Sexuality in mind. Gracewing had published my Christian Perspectives for Education ... Read More...

Liberating Sex - A Christian Sexual Theology
I still don't like the title of this book, but SPCK wouldn't accept Love Making, which was my preferred title. They thought it might attract the wrong sort of reader! Liberating Sex is my first foray into 'sexual theology', as James Nelson was then calling it. The Sunday Times got wind of it before it was published, and managed to get a couple of bishops (who had ... Read More...

Truly a Person, Truly God - a postmythical view of Jesus
Truly a Person, Truly God is my only book on Christology. For nine years I had taught some introductory Philosophy of Mind when a part-time tutor for The Open University between 1977 and 1987. I came to see that the difficulties philosophers encountered in their attempts to describe the human person were very similar to the difficulties theologians ... Read More...

The Ontology of Paul Tillich
The Ontology of Paul Tillich is the revision of my doctoral thesis completed at Oxford in 1973 under the inspired supervision of John Macquarrie, to whom I owe much. When I was an undergraduate at Regent's Park College I had to read part of Tillich's Systematic Theology Volume 2. I was delighted then to have found a modern theologian who was prepared to ... Read More...

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