I am not sure when Christian tradition lost confidence in the body, but I have some guesses. Although Jesus was a Jew, many of his earliest interpreters were Greeks, who divided body and soul in ways that he did not. Descartes did not help matters by opposing nature and reason in his philosophy. Then along came the Protestant Reformation, with its deep suspicion of physical pleasure, followed by Freud’s dark insights into human sexuality. Add to that the modern scientific reduction of the body to biological matter, overlaid by Victoria’s Secret ads, and it is small wonder that so many of us
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