The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and Quest for God. By Sarah Coakley. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 143 pp. $24.95 (paper).In The New Asceticism, Sarah Coakley brings together five revised essays first published in other places (two of them in Anglican Theological Review). Together, these essays provide a provocative intervention within stale and polarized debates about sexuality and gender. Coakley does more than merely restate typical positions or offer a simple via media between them. Throughout, she seeks help us move past roots of these debates in a striking contemporary confusion about 'desire' itself' (p. 4). Ultimately, positions she takes broaden typical contemporary accounts of erotic desire (whether liberal-libertine or conservative-repressive, a binary she explicitly rejects) by moving beyond facile equation of desire and sexuality and making connections with other forms of distorted and commodified desire that contribute our frenzied consumption and exploitative relationships more generally. At same time, Coakley also seeks deepen, discipline, and unify desire through a contemporary retrieval of ascetical theology of certain Greek fathers: Origen, Evagrius, Dionysius, and, especially Gregory of Nyssa.Gregory's treatise De Virginitate does much of heavy lifting here. For Gregoiy, fundamental choice is not between marriage and celibacy, but whether be a Pleasure-lover or a God-lover. Whether we are sexually active or celibate, the key issue ... is a training of desire, a lifelong commitment what we might now call 'long haul' of personal, erotic transformation, and thereby of reflection on final significance of all one's desires before God (p. 30). Sexual desire is seen as part of a whole nexus of desire with social, communal, and theological significance. For Christians, our desire for union has to last long enough, and be refined in God, as render back society what originally gave those partners possibility of mutual joy: that means (beyond immediate project of child-rearing and family) service poor and outcast, attention frail and orphans, a consideration of fruit of earth and its limitations, a vision of whole in which all play their part, both sacrificially and joyously (p. 6).With respect same-sex marriage, Coakley has contributed a great deal theological work we say we ought be doing, namely rethinking whole sacrament from ground up in light of its wider context in Christian life. For Coakley, this has do with sanctification of persons and therefore deepening and unification of desire as a divine perfection in which we participate by grace. Here, her dialogue with Freud and his popularizers, as well as Foucault and Nietzsche, is well worth considering. As a feminist, she accepts much of their critique of what was sick and repressive about some of older ascetical theology. But as a Catholic-minded Anglican priest and theologian with deeply sacramental sensibilities, she parts company with some liberals for whom any limitations beyond those imposed by requirements of mutual, adult consent seem unnatural. …