sexual ethics

Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s study of agency, consent, and sex on college campuses

And that conversation’s inevitable limits

I posed this question to the students in my sexual ethics class.

Looking at history through questions of power, sexual agency, and morality

Who I'd invite to my writers' dinner party

The Salvadoran archbishop was thoroughly of his own time. But his words speak to us too.

Sex is complicated. So is Christian reflection on it.

In a Century cover story, Katherine Willis Pershey mentions that she infuriated a friend with her beliefs about sex before marriage. That friend was me.

Human sexuality is fraught, particularly when mixed with the complexities of culture, religion, patriarchy, and adolescence.

There's a growing consensus that we should stop treating people who sell sex as criminals. But that's about where the consensus ends.

Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for a Christian Sexual Ethics is at #16 on the current Amazon sales list. When is the last time a sane, scholarly, carefully argued and theologically rich book of sexual ethics ranked that high?

I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it was recent. (Four out of the top five on the Amazon list are versions of Fifty Shades of Gray. If only those readers would open up Farley!) To make matters even stranger, the book is six years old and used mostly in seminaries and at religious institutions.

The flurry of interest was provoked by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Our August 23 cover story on monogamy and Dan Savage has
gotten a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Benjamin Dueholm offers a
nuanced take on the ways the popular sex columnist is beating pastors at their
own game--and the ways Savage's ethical worldview falls short. Some readers
seem too stuck on the first point--"the Christian
Century believes we should be instructed by an advice columnist," crows Joe Carter at First Things--to hear Dueholm out on the second.

For better or for worse, the sex columnist provides real-time exegesis of the seventh commandment.