To begin Love Thy Body, Pearcey identifies the driving force behind our most combative moral debates. That is, the shrewd separation of the psychological person from the physical body or the “two-story dualism,” as Pearcey refers to it. The history and framework of society’s person/body fracture is admittedly a bit complex.

Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, by Nancy R. Pearcey. Baker Books, 2018. 336 pages.

“Morality is the guidebook to fulfilling God’s original purpose for humanity,” writes the author of a new book addressing cultural decay, “the instruction manual for becoming the kind of person God intends us to be, the road map for reaching the human telos.”

This new book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, is meant to counter the most hot button issues facing culture—and Christians—today with tightly constructed arguments drenched in social science research and Biblical truths. Its author is Nancy R. Pearcey, an award-winning Evangelical author and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University.

In our postmodern age, it can be intimidating to challenge our secular culture’s reductive view of the body with absolute truths, especially with ever-expanding bullying tactics via social media. Thankfully, Pearcey’s Love Thy Body equips her readers to recognize the logical fallacies behind the deconstruction of the body, and by extension the efforts to hide evidence of human beings’ reflection of the image of God as Creator.

Pearcey, a former agnostic who as a teenager walked away from her Lutheran upbringing, is a widely respected intellectual and Christian apologist. She was featured in a 2015 Christianity Todaycover story, “Meet the Women Apologists” and The Economist has called Pearcey “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.”

To begin Love Thy Body, Pearcey identifies the driving force behind our most combative moral debates. That is, the shrewd separation of the psychological person from the physical body or the “two-story dualism,” as Pearcey refers to it. The history and framework of society’s person/body fracture is admittedly a bit complex. So it’s helpful to reread the first chapter as you move through the book so as to best recall how two-story dualism operates, as the author encourages her readers multiple times.

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