You Tube Theology

Let's talk about Diarmaid MacCulloch's fascinating new book, "Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity."

Tyler Cowen sat down with him to explore how ideas about sex, marriage, and authority shaped Western life across two millennia. Diarmaid challenges assumptions about monotheism and monogamy, shows how baptism created an early rhetoric of equality, and reads Paul's startling passage about the wife's and the man's body as a mystical, bodily vision of marriage.

The medieval spread of clerical celibacy and the framing of the Eucharist reshaped sex and marriage, while hostility to same-sex relations reflects a mix of Jewish concerns about procreation and austere Greek-Jewish strands. Cathedrals as "factories of prayer," purgatory, multiple altars, and elite endowments produced a pan-European religious infrastructure. The Reformation reorganized everything: married clergy, justification by faith, parishes, and the minister and family as public example.

Diarmaid warns against modern projections and later scholarship that don't fit the text. He quotes an Indian archivist that opening records can "unsettle many settled facts," and argues that unsettling facts is the historian's task to help society distinguish truth from comforting stories.

Topics:

• Religious History
• European Cathedral Architecture
• Protestant Reformation
• Clerical Celibacy & Marriage Law
• Purgatory and Afterlife Beliefs
• society and culture
• philosophy of mind and consciousness
• science and philosophy

This video is an original summary and commentary intended for educational purposes and is not a substitute for the original podcast.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeDKWf80Z3M