A First Things Partner Feature

released 12/22/2025

In this October 2023 lecture, Carl Trueman explores the concept of “desecration” as a frame for understanding the nature of modernity in our time. Trueman argues that, when added to modernity’s other primary features of disenchantment and liquidity, desecration gives a more complete theological account of cultural phenomena. The two areas in which this desecration is most obvious and consequential are sex and death. In both realms, desecration involves a conscious assertion of power over the body’s authority, limitations, and inherent significance for personhood. Trueman concludes with a call for the re-consecration of human beings as divine image-bearers in the context of local church liturgy and communities. A renewed, normative understanding of what it means to be human — a unity of body, mind, and spirit — must begin in the Church as it teaches and lives out these truths in community.

This lecture is provided courtesy of First Things magazine.

42 minutes

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