T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology. Edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale IHM, and Stephen Okey. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021. viii + 464 pages. $175.00.

editor Elizabeth Groppe, to the negative conditions of people working in the pornography industry, and all the authors do an excellent job of not shaming those who work in it, the main “victims” of pornography throughout the essays seem to be the men who watch it. One author goes so far as to compare the burden of having watched porn and being healed from it to the paschal mystery. By situating pornography as anti-sacrament, many of these authors write about the men who watch it as if they are victims of this mind-altering aesthetic culture. To be sure, pornography changes people for the worse. But the people who watch and get off on the violent sex acts, abuse, defilement, and lack of consent that characterizes the vast majority of pornography are the people doing harm, not just to their own minds, but to the women and sexual minorities who have to live day-in and day-out in the culture shaped by the normalization of this violence. In the final essay of the volume, John Cavadini thoughtfully notes that pornography “identifies manliness with the subordination and degradation of women” and posits that real masculinity, the “stronger man,” is exemplified in Love crucified. When I look at Love crucified, I see Christ spat upon, Christ bleeding, Christ naked and penetrated, Christ publicly humiliated for those around him to enjoy. To this theologian, the sacramental imagination must not only convert the minds of those who enjoy pornography, it must pay attention to and heal all those in society who have been harmed by it: all the women, sexual minorities, and children whose wounds resemble Christ’s.