Sex

Kate Ott challenges us to practice erotically attuned love everywhere, even online.

Her new essay collection examines how Americans thread the needle between care and constraint.

And that conversation’s inevitable limits

The sarcastic and sacrilegious two-season show has a moral center.

I wanted to give them better than what I had. It wasn't easy.

Teenage girls navigate a tough landscape. There are tools the church can offer them.

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.

When I first had sex, it wasn't just teenage hormones. I wanted to know and be known.

The old stereotype is that evangelicals are unable or unwilling to talk about sex. Lately, the reality is the opposite.

I’ve been interested in the idea of “taboos” for a long time—those intricate rules that overarch our society and ideas of the sacred. They can be tools to keep people from harming others or themselves. They can be used as social conditioning, arbitrarily enforcing certain behaviors as a means of control.

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.

The current issue of Marie Claire contains an interview with a young, unmarried pastor whose calling impacts her sex life--because her ordination vows include celibacy in singleness.