“Why Bragging About Your Sex Life Isn’t Just Annoying“ - Sharon Hodde Miller adds some additional thoughts to Tim Challies recent article, “Keeping Intimate Details Intimate.” Her post also discusses some of the misguided messages about marriage an sex that I wrote about here, in my review of Tim and Kathy Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage.

“Americans exist in a culture that prizes sex as a high good, if not one of thehighest goods. This priority evidences itself everywhere: between language about sexual orientation and marital rights, to a woman’s right to choose, Americans want to have as much sex as they desire with as few hindrances as possible. We not only believe this is our right, but some would compare sex to a “need” as basic as eating.

In a culture where sex is such an integral aspect of human flourishing, Christians seems to agree. Just look at the way we talk about sex. Christians want non-Christians to believe we have the very best sex lives of all, and we are not only committed to making this goal a reality, but we brag about it when we succeed. If good sex is a competition, it is a competition we are committed to winning.

As a result, holiness practices such as abstinence and monogamy are re-conceived as mere players in the game. They are frequently discussed within the context of their service to better sex. For example: “If you wait until marriage, your sex will be better,” or “If you remain faithful to your spouse, sex will be more meaningful than empty promiscuity or serial relationships.””

“All of that to say, talking too openly about sex–especially bragging about our great Christian sex lives–is not necessarily accomplishing what we hope. Even if we win the competition, we are ultimately in the wrong game. Although Christians certainly affirm that sex is a good gift from God to be celebrated, we cannot affirm the culture’s unhealthy obsession with it, an obsession that ultimately contends with the primacy of God. If we play into the culture’s belief that sex is a primary good, then we will struggle to maintain coherence and credibility when we simultaneously oppose our culture’s application of this good.

Sex must be rightly ordered in the Christian life, and our language about sex should reflect that ordering. That is not to say that we should return to the approach of previous generations and avoid talking about sex altogether. There is so much brokenness attached to sex in our world, and the church should be a safe and open place where people can seek healing in their sexual lives.”

“Studies Tie Human Bladder Infections To Antibiotics In Chicken“ - NPR’s food blog takes a look at one of the ways the agricultural use of antibiotics may possibly be affecting the health of consumers.

“What do some persistent human bladder infections and some innocent-looking chicken cutlets have in common? Drug-resistant E. coli, scientists say.

How the same bad bug got in both places is the focus of a recentinvestigation by Maryn McKenna, a journalist with the Food and Environment Reporting Network who, in her own words, “finds emerging diseases strangely exciting.” She’s the author of thebook SUPERBUG, which is all about drug-resistant staph infections, and she blogs about antibiotic resistance over at Wired.”

“Definitely we should be concerned, for several reasons. The most obvious is that food is an exposure we all share, so an epidemic in which food plays a role has the potential to be very large indeed. The second is that antibiotic use in agriculture dwarfs antibiotic use in human medicine — so to whatever degree human medicine amplifies antibiotic resistance, agriculture is likely to be creating a larger effect. And the third is that, unlike in human medicine, we have almost no surveillance for what resistance is occurring in animals, so we’re unable to predict where it might move or what diseases it might cause.”