“IT'S HARD TO imagine the average evangelical church embracing Mutesa’s colorful portraits of nude black joy,” writes Faith-Marie Zamblé in her profile of the young photographer whose work is rippled with laughter, face paint, and bare skin. Though the mood of Mimi Mutesa’s work is more exuberant than explicit, Zamblé is right: Blame it on the apple, Augustine, or purity culture, but many churches we know—evangelical or otherwise—blush when it comes to body parts, especially naked ones. Ever notice how crucifixes often have Jesus wearing a loincloth despite scripture’s insistence he was stripped?
We suspect Christian jitters around nudity are rooted in fear that naked bodies will arouse unholy sexual thoughts. But as Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber points out, the church’s tendency to couple sexuality and sin has led to a sense of shame that many Christians find hard to shake. “I wonder how we could begin to honor sexual pleasure as something that can connect us more deeply to ourselves and others and God, yet still speak the truth about the ways in which our behaviors around sex can also do the opposite,” she writes in “Honor Thy Sexual Pleasure?” an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation.
In our cover story, Assistant Editor Da’Shawn Mosley talks about faith with Benjamin Crump, the civil rights attorney whose clients include the families of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and most recently Emantic Bradford Jr., a black man shot from behind by police at an Alabama mall on Thanksgiving Day. Despite his line of work, Crump is hopeful, writes Mosley, and “gives the impression that he cares about my well-being, my whole self, and he has oriented his life toward holding the American legal system accountable for my safety.”
This too is an expression of sensuality, not of the prurient variety, but of deep attentiveness to both body and soul. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread,” wrote James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. Body and blood, flesh and soul: This form of sensuality is essential to our holy recovery.
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