Professional Sexual Ethics

Sexual health is an essential part of maintaining professional relationships in ministry. Focusing on implications for the practice of ministry, this book engages all dimensions of theological education and academic disciplines. Each chapter includes an analysis of common ministry situations, discussion questions, practical guidelines, and resources for further study. The volume is ideal for use in courses on professional ethics for ministry, advanced leadership training, and continuing education for clergy.

Rules about sexuality, written and unwritten, have existed in every culture as have disagreements over what is and isn't acceptable. Must morally permissible sex have only one function? Must it be heterosexual? Must it occur within the confines of the institution of marriage? Must it be accompanied by requisite emotions such as love and intimacy?

A review of the literature on ministerial ethics reveals scant reflection on it among Catholics. So this book is a modest attempt to make a Catholic contribution to stimulate a conversation within the Catholic Church on professional ethics in pastoral ministry.

This volume combines insights from secular sexuality education, trauma studies, and embodiment to explore effective strategies for teaching sexuality and religion in colleges, universities, and seminaries. Contributors to this volume address a variety of sexuality-related issues including reproductive rights, military prostitution, gender, fidelity, queerness, sexual trauma, and veiling from the perspective of multiple religious faiths. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars present pedagogy and classroom strategies appropriate for secular and religious institutional contexts. By foregrounding a combination of "perspective transformation" and "embodied learning" as a means of increasing students’ appreciation for the varied social, psychological, theological and cultural contexts in which attitudes to sexuality develop, the volume posits sexuality as a critical element of teaching about religion in higher education. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and libraries in the fields of Religious Studies, Religious Education, Gender & Sexuality, Religion & Education, and Sociology of Religion.

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

It may be unnecessary to some to publish a text on sexuality in 1986 since the popular press speaks of the sexual revolution as if it were over and was possibly a mistake. Some people characterize society as too sexually obsessed, and there is an undercurrent of desire for a return to a supposedly simpler and happier time when sex was not openly dis cussed, displayed, taught or even, presumedly, contemplated. Indeed, we are experiencing something of a backlash against open sexuality and sexual liberation. For example, during the '60s and '70s tolerance of homosexual persons and homosexuality increased. Of late there has been a conservative backlash against gay-rights laws. Sexual intercourse before marriage, which had been considered healthy and good, has been, of late, characterized as promiscuous. In fact, numer ous articles have appeared about the growing popularity of sexual abstinence. There is a renewed vigor in the fight against sex education in the schools, and an 'anti-pornography' battle being waged by those on the right and those on the left who organize under the guise of such worthy goals as deterring child abuse and rape, but who are basically uncomfortable with diverse expressions of sexuality. One would hope that such trends, and the ignorance about sex and sexuality that they reflect, would not touch medical professionals. That Dr.