April 4 - 5, 2026 For some of our readers, this past week has been one of suffering and atonement. And those are just the Duke fans. But seriously, Happy Easter and Passover. With God on our mind, the Weekend Beacon is delighted to feature the theologian and bioethicist Gilbert Meilaender, who reviews Carl Trueman’s The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5isP!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25703e6d-2556-42bb-8b41-9fdf73bafecf_703x491.jpeg Trueman examines how it is that, at least on his telling, our world has become one in which limits are no longer meaningful moral boundaries but, rather, obstacles to be overcome. What we have lost, he says, is the sense that every human being is made in the image of God. But it is not as if this belief has just slipped away gradually, no longer making sense in a disenchanted world. Trueman’s claim is stronger. Our culture now takes delight in surpassing and setting aside old limits that were thought to characterize our humanity. The problem is not disenchantment but desecration—the transgressing of older moral limits. “Although the book begins with several chapters that seek to explain how we have come to this point, it may be helpful to begin with later chapters that discuss some of the ways in which the image of God in humanity has been set aside. Unsurprisingly, near the top of the list is the sexual revolution. ‘The idea that all are made in the image of God places upon each person the obligation to treat others as persons, as those intrinsically worthy of acknowledgment as subjects, as ends in themselves.’ And this, Trueman argues, is precisely what has been lost in the way many in our culture now think about sexual activity. It used to be thought, as Christian tradition had taught, that the sexual relation between a man and a woman was one in which each answered to deep human needs of the other—and that their mutual self-giving might, in the providence of God, also gives rise to the next generation. Thus, there was important human meaning in the sexual relation—meaning so central to human life that it needed to be embedded in and protected by the covenant of marriage. “When, however, sex becomes largely recreational, the satisfaction simply of individual desire, it turns out to undermine itself. Trueman unpacks several ways in which this has happened, first in the changing relation between men and women, and then more generally in our political life. The end result, he believes, is that what ‘promises to liberate us as individual agents … ends up creating a world where we are doomed to experience life as objects,’ rather than as those who are ‘ends in themselves.’”