Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Every Square Inch. My name is Robert Cunningham.

If you're new to the podcast, this serves as an outlet for my public thoughts. I don't think

it's appropriate for me to use the pulpit on Sunday mornings as a platform for that.

But I do think the idea of Christian ministers adding their voice to the public square is an

important part of societal life. And so this is my attempt to do that. We have been in a series

of follow-up podcasts to a conference I led on human sexuality and

gender, answering some questions and going deeper than I was able to do at the conference.

And this will be the last of those before I move on to different cultural issues.

And in this one, I'm going to answer two questions with one podcast.

One of those is for my married friends and one of those is for my single friends. And I'm going to answer two questions with one podcast. One of those is for my married friends

and one of those is for my single friends, and I'll take them in that order. So for the married

folks, a big question that I didn't get into in a conference was the role of contraception

when it comes to a theology of sex. You will recall that when I laid out the theology,

conception is a huge part of the story of Eros. And this is why Catholic friends who might listen

to my interpretation of John Paul's theology of the body would be furious at me for not condemning

contraception. Now, admittedly, what I've tried to offer is a

Protestant take on John Paul's work. I gave myself the freedom to chew on the meat of his

theology and spit out the bones, so to speak. And the most controversial bone I spit out was

the issue of contraception. Those familiar with

theology of body know that John Paul and more recently Christopher West, who has kind of popularized

his theology for the Catholics, both would say the entire theology falls apart when you bring

contraception into it. I didn't want the conference to get derailed

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