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This event has been cancelled due to circumstances beyond the speaker’s control. Online purchases will be refunded automatically. Please contact the Blackwell’s or marquee box office for a refund if you purchased by phone or in person.

Writer, academic and broadcaster Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores some of the raunchier themes in the Bible, from the erotic to the sexually explicit.

She will show how and why key themes, including the celebration of lovers’ foreplay, the ritual power of sex, the pornographic exposure of the body, and the fetishisation of God’s penis, played a major role in the theologies of the Bible – and how they continue to impact religions today. Stavrakopoulou has previously argued that God had a wife and that Eve had been unfairly maligned and was not responsible for the fall of man.

Stavrakopoulou is professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter’s Department of Theology and Religion. She presented the BBC TV series Bible’s Buried Secrets and has contributed to a number of television documentaries and debates. Stavrakopoulou describes herself as an “atheist with a huge respect for religion”. Her books include Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah.

Presented by Centre for Inquiry