A Naked Gospel: Podcast with Shane O'Neill
Photo by Marisol Benitez on Unsplash
In October 2019, I wrote a post about how the consumption of pornography was not about sex.
Though this blog post was not heavily promoted, it nonetheless became one of my most read pieces of writing. I am yet to determine whether this is because there is a growing number of people who are thinking deeply about the cultural phenomenon of pornography, or because people were looking for pornography and stumbled upon my blog instead.
The core idea is that, rather than sexual activity, what has become commodified and peddled by the porn industry are the varieties of possible sexual activity.
Earlier manifestations of this idea have been published on the sites of Courage International and the Humanum Review, and I had the chance for a deeper dive in a wonderfully wide ranging interview with Shane O’Neill.
Shane hosts The Naked Gospel, which is an initiative of Proven Ministries. The ministry was originally founded to assist Christian men who struggle with sexual addiction, including an addiction to pornography. However, Shane also told me that it has branched out to provide outreach for other demographics as well, including singles and couples.
The interview used as a launch point my recently published article “Pornography & Christology”, which was published in the Australasian Catholic Review. In that interview I revisited John Milbank’s metaphysical genealogy where the medieval priority of the actual over the possible became overturned in the univocal and nominalist metaphysics of the late medieval period. We then talked about how this metaphysical priority is something that is not unique to pornography, but permeates through all forms of a cultural lifeform where disengagement has become the norm.
Reality is not so much the acquisition of something, but the anticipation of the next acquisition. This has the effect of negating our attention to what is in front of us, and our esteem of what is present before us. Finally, we explored the article’s point on how the desire for redemption is embedded in the consumption of pornography, a riff off GK Chesterton’s line that a man knocks on a brothel door while really searching for God.
Listen to the full podcast interview here.
Sidenote: Listeners to that podcast might also be interested in a related interview that I did with Justine Toh from the Centre for Public Christianity.
My thanks is due to Shane from Proven Ministries for this interview. I must also note that this would not have been possible without a referral by Hope Johnson of Hope Unyielding, who took the time to read “Pornography and Christology” and send it over to Shane. Thanks is due to her, so please do take the time to listen to her.
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