How Roman Sex Became Christian Shame
The scholarly Peter Brown reviews Kyle Harper‘s new book, “From Shame To Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity.” It’s a nuanced essay, but Brown is quite blunt at the outset: ‘We always knew that the Romans had a lot of sex. Indeed, in the opinion of our elders, they probably had a lot more than was quite good for them. We also always knew that the early Christians had an acute sense of sin. We tend to think that they had a lot more sense of sin than they should have had. Otherwise they were very like ourselves.’ Fascinating — and deeply challenging — stuff.
