Could it be that 1 Corinthians 7:26-27 is more directly relevant right here, right now, in the midst of a pandemic than at any other point in our lifetime?

In this episode of her podcast, Juli invites Dr. Dani Treweek to share her thoughts on the significance of the single life, why being a Christian single doesn't mean you're called to singleness, and why celibacy is not extraordinary.

And then there are the theological soundbites. You know the ones? The quotations from well-known Christian authors or speakers (past or present) that are almost always accompanied by an appropriately thematic stock photo. My newsfeed is increasingly populated by these sort of soundbites

Perhaps the dismal uncertainty, yet miserable familiarity of lockdown is actually a moment of opportunity. Perhaps now is the time for us to rediscover that there is more to human intimacy than genital intimacy. Perhaps now is the occasion for us as a society to finally recognise a genuine breadth of relationships as being wonderfully essential to life. Perhaps the pandemic has one more lesson to teach us after all.

In the character of Alexander Hamilton we see our exquisite, tragic, complicated selves reflected back to us, as if in a mirror. We see our yearnings for meaning, significance, relationship, security, pleasure all laid bare, alongside our self-defeating and self-corrupting ways.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.’ Though written in the mid-twentieth century, Lewis’s words are no less true today. Like all of those before it, our age has its own outlook. We twenty-first century people tend to consider ourselves especially insightful on certain matters, especially able to perceive certain truths. But of course, what we are not able to recognise quite so clearly is that our age is also liable to make certain mistakes, especially prone to not seeing the errors of its own way.

Christian singleness is a case of either choice, or circumstance. Or is it? Could it be that taking the time to consider our perspective about singleness and single Christians might help us to understand the importance of being more nuanced in our thinking about it, and about them?

Dani explains about her research into singleness in the church and unpacks some of the issues that we all need to think about in order to value and include single people in church life. She talks about how we can learn from historical Christian thinking that challenges our contemporary cultural blind spots and leads us into a richer understanding of God’s design for singleness, marriage and our sexualities.

Today's Christian - and particularly evangelical - discourse portrays the single form of life as fundamentally and intrinsically abnormative, whether directly or indirectly. Such a conclusion is aptly demonstrated at even the most fundamental level of terminology.