Sexuality: few topics are as personal, embodied, experiential, culturally dependent, political, and moralized. Attitudes about sexuality are often bound up in issues of shame, guilt, power, and freedom. Sexuality has been at the heart of the US culture wars for nearly half a century; divisions over sexuality are reshaping the religious landscape; public debate about sexuality has reached a fever pitch in US legal discourse; cross-cultural comparisons reveal a wide array of morals and practices; and rates of childhood and adult sexual abuse are staggering. Yet, sexuality conspicuously silences open dialogue given its taboo status in many religious and theological contexts. How do we overcome silence and taboo in order to teach effectively, responsibly, and explicitly about sexuality and religion?

A uniquely modern American illusion is that we can put anything into our bodies and subsequently demand everything of them without consequences. This is bunk. Our attitude and approach to self-care can either enhance the body’s effectiveness or limit it.

A common (mis)conceptualization of self-care, and one that I have been guilty of having, defines it as a set of activities separate from our personal and professional lives. It is treated as a task we attend to on an as-needed or as a single-strategy manner for coping with preexisting stress or crisis.

The trouble with this is approach is that it often allows us to reach a critical condition before we engage it. At this rate, any regularity in our “habit” of self-care more likely reflects a steady state of critical stress which forces us to find time for it, often when illness makes us unfit for anything else.