Shameless Audiobook By Nadia Bolz-Weber cover art

Shameless

A Sexual Reformation

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Shameless

By: Nadia Bolz-Weber
Narrated by: Nadia Bolz-Weber
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About this listen

Raw, intimate, and timely, Nadia Bolz-Weber’s latest book offers a full-blown overhaul of our harmful and antiquated ideas about sex, gender, and our bodies.

Christians are obsessed with sex. But not in a good way. For generations countless people have suffered pain, guilt, and judgment as a result of this toxic fixation on sex, the body, and physical pleasure. In the follow-up to her celebrated New York Times best seller Accidental Saints, Bolz-Weber unleashes her critical eye, her sharp pen, and her vulnerable but hopeful soul on the caustic, fear-riddled, and religiously inspired messages about sex that have fed our shame.

In turn, Bolz-Weber offers no simple amendments or polite compromises, because the stakes are too high - and our souls and our bodies are worth too much. Instead, this tattooed, swearing, modern-day pastor calls for a new reformation. She urges us to take antiquated, sexist ideas about sex, gender, and our bodies and “burn them the f--k down and start all over.”

This is a journey of holy resistance. Along the way, as antidotes to shame, heresy, and all-too-familiar injustice, Bolz-Weber dispenses grace, freedom, and courage. She shares stories, poetry, and scripture, cultivating resilient hope and audacious love rooted in good news that is “powerful enough, transgressive enough, and beautiful enough to heal not only the ones who have been hurt but also those who have done the hurting.”

In Bolz-Weber’s most personal, bracingly honest book yet, she shares intimately about her life, with her trademark blend of vulnerability, humor, and candor. If you’ve been mistreated, confused, angered, and/or wounded by the shaming sexual messages so prevalent in religion, this one is for you. Includes a PDF of images and drawings from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Nadia Bolz-Weber (P)2019 Random House Audio
Ministry & Evangelism Personal Development Sex Instruction Social Issues
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Critic reviews

Shameless is a triumph. Nadia Bolz-Weber returns to readers the gift toxic religion and consumer culture stole: the gift of sexuality. Her wisdom is unparalleled, her vulnerability touching, her storytelling masterful, and her perspective both ancient and fresh. Shameless will give its readers their joy, relationships, and freedom back.” (Glennon Doyle, author of number-one New York Times best seller Love Warrior, Founder and President of Together Rising)

Shameless is one of the most important, life-changing books I’ve ever read. Expertly-crafted and lovingly delivered, it serves as both a bomb and a balm - blowing up the lies religion teaches about sex and tenderly healing the wounds those messages have inflicted. Pastoral and prophetic, Shameless weaves together history, theology, biblical studies, personal narrative, and sex ed, without ever losing sight of its most important aim - honoring the dignity of actual human beings living actual, messy and beautiful lives. It’s Nadia Bolz-Weber’s best book yet. And that’s saying something.” (Rachel Held Evans, author of Searching for Sunday and Inspired)

“If the conversation around sex in the Church has felt like a small, cramped room to you, brace yourself: Nadia Bolz-Weber is about to kick in the door, hustle you outside, and burn down the room as you march out into the fresh air. This irreverent, bold, and authentic book is deeply centered in love and the transforming goodness of God. If ever there was a time for the Church to disrupt the world's broken notions around sex, gender, masculinity, and power with this sort of a shameless reformation, it is now. And Nadia is the loving, hopeful, wise, take-no-prisoners disruptor we've been waiting for.” (Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist and Out of Sorts)

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Healing the Hurt of THE Church!

A must-teach text for all churches to adopt. 'Bout damn time, too. Timely for inclusivity needs in the United Methodist Church, increasing abortion restrictions, reformation needs in the Catholic and the Southern Baptist Churches, and for anyone who knows God is LOVE but didn't know that churches that don't preach this first and foremost missed the mark, and that there are ones that do and that will accept you - as you are, because namaste everyone. We are ALL children of God.

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Pastoral, Healing, Water for a dry and weary soul

The first words that come to my mind to describe “Shameless” by Nadia Bolz-Weber are pastoral, healing, water for a dry and weary soul.

The money quote for me came in the introduction:

"We should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings." (5)

Right after that, Nadia reminds us that 500 years ago Martin Luther took a close look at the harm in his parishioners’ spiritual lives. In his case he focused on the damage that came from them trying to fulfill sacramental obligations that the church said would appease an angry God. Luther was bold and daring enough to believe that Christians could find freedom from the harm their church and done to them: “Luther was less loyal to the teachings of the church than he was to people, and this helped spark what is now known as the Protestant Reformation." (5)

I also loved the illustration of the irrigation system that only waters in a circular pattern, leaving the corners and edges of the farmland without water. Nadia says this book is for those un-watered places, for the ones who do not fit inside the small circle of the church’s behavior codes. "This book […] is water, I hope, for those planted in the corners. [...] This book is for the young Evangelical who silently disagrees with the church’s stance on sex and sexual orientation, yet feels alone in that silence. This book is for anyone who wonders, even subconsciously: Has the church obsessed over this too much? Do we really think we’ve gotten it right?"

Nadia writes, “our sexual and gender expressions are as integral to who we are as our religious upbringings are. To separate these aspects of ourselves—to separate life as a sexual being from a life with God—is to bifurcate our psyche, like a musical progression that never comes to resolution."

Nadia makes me laugh several times throughout the book also: “So if the traditional teachings of the church around sex and the body have caused no harm in the lives of the people around you, and have even provided them a plan for true human flourishing, then this book probably is not for you. (Good news, though: the Christian publishing world is your oyster. There you’ll find no lack of books to uphold and even help you double down on your beliefs.)"

She made me laugh again at the end of chapter 5. In this chapter Nadia talks about the day that she and several of her parishioners worked together to write their "Denver Statement" in response to "The Nashville Statement". She then showed us snippets from both. The very end of The Nashville Statement says, “WE DENY that the Lord’s arm is too short to save or that any sinner is beyond his reach." The counter line from The Denver Statement says, “WE DENY that God is a boy and has actual arms." 😂


Other quotes and passages that really struck me:

From the introduction:
- "I will not indulge in the sin of false equivalency. To admit that both the church and our culture can cause harm is not the same as saying the harm from both is equivalent. It is not. Because as harmful as the messages from society are, what society does not do is say that these messages are from God. Our culture does not say to me that the creator of the universe is disgusted by my cellulite."

- "Let us consider the harm that has been caused in God’s name, but let’s not be satisfied with stopping there. We must reach for a new Christian sexual ethic."

- "Where sex is concerned, for sexual flourishing to occur we must be guided by more than just the absence of “no” and the absence of harm. That’s why I believe we must also bring concern to our consent and mutuality. Concern moves us closer to the heart of Jesus’s own ethic: love God and our neighbor as ourselves. It requires us to act on another’s behalf. It reframes the choice entirely outside of our own self-interest in a way that consent and mutuality alone do not.”

- “Concern means taking notice of how our sexual behavior affects ourselves and each other. I may be having a mutually pleasurable, consensual relationship with someone, but if I am cheating on my spouse at the time, I have failed to show concern for the person I am married to. If I am in a crisis and totally distraught, I may be more likely to consent to sex when in fact it is the last thing I need. If someone intuits this and sleeps with me anyway, they have consent, but they are not showing care and concern. A sexual ethic that includes concern means seeing someone as a whole person and not just a willing body. The only way to show true concern for ourselves and others is to see, to pay attention."

From Chapter 1:

- “The Greek word for salvation is sozo, which means “to heal, bring wholeness, preserve.” This is what God does. God heals fractured parts of ourselves back together into wholeness."

- "Holiness is the union we experience with one another and with God. Holiness is when more than one become one, when what is fractured is made whole. Singing in harmony. Breastfeeding a baby. Collective bargaining. Dancing. Admitting our pain to someone, and hearing them say, “Me too.” Holiness happens when we are integrated as physical, spiritual, sexual, emotional, and political beings. Holiness is the song that has always been sung, perhaps even the sound that was first spoken when God said, “Let there be light".

- "Whether we realize it or not, we often find ways to alleviate feelings of existential aloneness through the seeking of unity. We fill our lives with things that distract us from the sound of our deepest isolation tapping at the window. Food, entertainment, success, sex, relationships, busyness, gossip—there are plenty of ways to divert our attention from the unavoidable, terrifying aloneness of human existence. But there is a difference between distraction from and alleviation of. Moments of unity—holiness—actually alleviate isolation, which is not the same as simply distracting us from our isolation. In the same way, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee distract from the feelings of hunger, but eating food alleviates them. Temporarily, of course. But that is what it means to be human."

- "To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion. Both pursuits expose such a large surface area of the self, which can then be either hurt or healed. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue."

- "Holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from."


From Chapter 2:

- "The nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher defines heresy as “that which preserves the appearance of Christianity, and yet contradicts its essence.”

- “The heresy is this: with all the trappings of Christianity behind us, we who seek to justify or maintain our dominance over another group of people have historically used the Bible, Genesis in particular, to prove that domination is not actually an abuse of power at the expense of others, but is indeed part of “God’s plan.”

Footnote 52:
"The best definition of sin I have ever heard is found in Francis Spufford’s book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (New York: HarperOne, 2013), where he defines it as HPFTU: “the Human Propensity to F*** Things Up.”

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I'm currently finishing this in a forest alone.

I need to listen to this again and again. This past year and a half, I've struggled to find Christ in anything. Friends, he is here. Thank you for this book.

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will take time to digest...

Wow. This book will take some time to digest. I'm in the middle of thinking deeply about many things (people seem to call this "deconstruction") and I am not confident I "agree" with every word or claim in this book...but agreeing isn't really the point of the journey. It is most certainly written by a Pastor and hearing it read by the Pastor herself was a special experience. Nadia clearly cares deeply for her congregation and for the extension of her congregation...her readers. Give it a listen if you want to experience what it's like to be seen/heard/loved. That's how I felt.

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Water

Oh, Nadia. She seems to have a way of preaching that (and I’m speaking of “preaching” in the Christian Evangelist sense not just in general) not only inspires but also embodies. She speaks to flesh and spirit in the voice of a healer, a mother, a friend. Shameless is a prime example of this but carte blanche; absolutely liberated. The book speaks bluntly and rather crudely at times about sex and sexuality particularly as experienced by western Christians. It tackles the difficulty experienced by the faithful in terms of living in their bodies in a holistic way without denying the needs and desires of the body. She’s not calling for some orgy-like free-for-all a’la the hippie movement but an honest, and reflective look into how the church and culture overall contribute to our relationships with our sexual bodies, with sensuality and our relationship with pleasure. The spirit of reformation is found in how she approaches the church’s ministerial role in regards to the human as a being of desire as one that should be able to listen and adjust per person, per soul. That this should be undertaken with love and understanding, with acceptance of who and they are, how they relate to the physical world and affirmation instead of rejection, do condemnation and “othering”. Nadia invites Christians to reflect upon what doctrines, traditions and scriptural interpretation, exegesis and pastoral hermeneutics that may have been, and are actively causing damage in the psychosexual sense to people; tackling the root cause of these damaging and teachings and offering a new perspective based on an orthodox understanding of Christ and scripture combined with what we know today in regards to psychology and a healthier understanding of human sexuality. Through stories and anecdotes she preaches an idea of a church that not only seeks to expose its harmful teachings and change them under the guidance of the holy spirit but one that also seeks to expose the reparative and healing nature of relationship with Christ in regards to the true self, body and soul, naked and unafraid before God. It’s like cool water for the soul that suffers in the body. For people like myself, an lgbtq+ Christian who’s suffered from harmful teachings spouted by the church as true and inspired it’s absolutely refreshing to read Nadia’s words here. There’s an analogy she makes in the book with sexual minorities of faith and crops in a garden planted furthest from a watering sprinkler in how the church only seems to acknowledge cisgender heterosexual peoples bodies as sacred and worthy of sexual expression solely in the confines of sacramental marriage and all others who don’t or can’t fit into that category are not only shamed for their sexuality identities, gender orientations and the like but who’s desires connected to said identities/orientations are “sinful” and therefore the only way to truly be acceptable in the church as sexual beings is for them to deny themselves and try to force themselves into a cisgender heterosexual identity in order to have a place in the church, concluding that the only way they can see themselves as sacred and having dignity whilst expressing their sexual desires is to either be inside of a cisgender heterosexual sacramental marriage or to not have them at all not in the form of monastic, clerical or otherwise spiritual celibacy but a sort of forced utilitarian celibacy that operates as a symbolic castration. Thusly these people are ignored, unwatered by the sprinkler as the goal post for acceptable embodiment is moved away. The book offers itself as water to those who are excluded in this way and invites for others in the church to do the same.

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A breath of fresh air

Growing up & living in the south is often suffocating with the manipulation that our “bible buckle” churches drown us in. So nice to have somebody finally say “The emperor had no clothes” and have the theological chops to back it up. Thank you Rev Nadia!

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Affirming and validating; a true gift

I wish I had a book like this to read earlier in my life. Even though I’ve come to most of the same conclusions as Nadia Bolz-Weber presents in the book in my own time (through a lot of my own soul searching, theological study, and therapy), it was incredibly powerful to hear a pastor speak the words aloud. She affirmed my experiences, my sexuality, and validating my feelings. I felt seen by her and it’s one of the first times I’ve felt seen by a pastor in such a public platform. I know many people are still navigating through the damaging messages of the church, I definitely recommend this book as part of your journey. It was validating, encouraging, affirming, and enlightening.

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Changed my life.

This book changed my life. If you're just the tiniest bit interested, I would highly recommend it.

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This was worth it

This book was transformative. It was powerful, and I’m definitely going to read this again.

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Liberating

I was so surprised by how deeply this book affected me. I found myself driving around LA, listening and crying and audibly talking back like I was in church. For anyone who grew up in fundamentalism, I know this book will liberate you. Thank you Nadia.

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