Ellison - Making love just : sexual ethics for perplexing times

Advance praise for Making Love Just

This excellent book is a must-read for anyone seeking a progressive, principled, and provocative guide to Christian sexual ethics. In moving us from just making love to making love just, Marvin Ellison addresses difficult and complex issues head-on, ranging from polyamory to same-sex domestic abuse. LGBTQ folks will find this book especially helpful, whether in the classroom, congregation, bedroom, or beyond.

Patrick S. Cheng, Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Author of Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology

Making Love Just is an eloquent and comprehensive guide to doing liberative sexual ethics for human and planetary good. While Ellison finds the Christian tradition is in many respects a noble tradition to preserve and promote, when it comes to the dynamic processes of sex and sexuality over time, he pursues its spirited critique and transformation. In solidarity with the sexually abused, exploited, and vulnerable, he raises astute moral questions and demonstrates the difficult process of discerning what is just and loving in sex, gender, and family issuesand to delight in taking a stand with others on controversial matters of sexual justice.

Marilyn J. Legge, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics

Emmanuel College of Victoria University and Toronto School of Theology

Ellison urges a profoundly loving re-call to compassionate conversation to all who would claim to exemplify the unfathomable love of Christ. With courageous intellectual boldness and a gentle pastoral heart, Making Love Just readily provides a theologically grounded ethic way beyond perplexity and into the sacred realm of precious and life-giving relational possibility. What a timely scholarly gift this book offers to those ever anxious to doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly.

Dr. Jenny Plane Te Paa, Dean

Te Rau Kahikatea, St. Johns Theological College, Auckland, New Zealand

Marvin Ellison weaves many wise voices, including his own, into a liberating method of ethical discernment. This book starts new, necessary conversations. The welcome result is justice-love and a safer world. Read and heed!

Mary E. Hunt, codirector of the Womens Alliance
for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Editor with Diann L. Neu of New Feminist Christianity:
Many Voices, Many Views

Faith leaders across traditions are calling for a new sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts. That yearning for a sex-positive and justice-oriented framework is expressed strongly in the Religious Institutes own Religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. Thats why I am so pleased with Marvin Ellisons latest book, which provides such a helpful guide for the theologian, seminarian, and person of faith who is seeking to understand and integrate a truly redemptive Christian ethic of sexuality.

Debra Haffner, Executive Director, Religious Institute

Author of A Time to Build: Creating Sexually Healthy
Faith Communities and Meditations on the Good News

In advocating for a sex-positive transformation of Christian approaches to sexual ethics, Ellison offers here a challenging and much-needed discussion of many of the thorny issues that plague contemporary conversations about sexuality. By helping readers to reframe the questions, Ellison opens up entrenched debates about what is right and wrong to new avenues of discourse that privilege justice, human dignity, and relationships of equality and mutual respect. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in questions of human sexuality.

Rebecca Todd Peters, Associate Professor and Chair,
Department of Religious Studies, Elon University

Author of In Search of the Good Life:
The Ethics of Globalization

A Revolution of Justice! Remarkably written, Ellison gives us a gift of sex-positive approaches to Christian sexual ethics. Weaving the analytic with sincere attention to tears in our communities crying for hope, Making Love Just exposes the truth in our traditions that silences sex talk and dishonors bodies and sexualities by breaking forth new streams of thought with liberating clarity, method, and purpose. This book meets us at our point of need with a prophetic tongue and transformative embrace. You must read this book! It paves a brave path of healing grace, wholeness, and safer spirituality for us all!

Melanie L. Harris, Associate Professor of Religion and Ethics,
Texas Christian University

Author of Gifts of Virtue: Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics

INTRODUCTION: WHERE DO WE DRAW OUR LINES, AND WHY?

Illustrated London News (May 5, 1928), from The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986).

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 28283.

Dagmar Herzog, Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2008), xi.

Anthony Weston, A Practical Companion to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12.

Ibid.

Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1994), 2.

L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988 [rev. 2007]), 262.

Marvin M. Ellison, Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

Daniel C. Maguire, The Shadow Side of the Homosexuality Debate, in Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life , ed. Jeannine Gramick (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 3839.

Luke Timothy Johnson, A Disembodied Theology of the Body, in Human Sexuality in the Catholic Tradition , ed. Kieran Scott and Harold Daly Horell (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 114.

CHAPTER 1: WHY DO WE HAVE TO KEEP TALKING ABOUT SEX ALL THE TIME?

Thomas Laqueur, Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology, in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century , ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 4.

. Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sex, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader , ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 11.

Peggy Brick, Toward a Positive Approach to Adolescent Sexuality, SIECUS Report 17:5 (MayJuly 1989): 1.

James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 52.

Rubin, Thinking Sex, 34.

Walter Brueggemann, Voices of the Night against Justice, in Walter Brueggemann, Sharon Parks, and Thomas H. Groome, To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly: An Agenda for Ministers (New York: Paulist, 1986), 5.

Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon, 1985).

May Sarton, At Seventy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 10.

Marvin M. Ellison, Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 2.

Thomas J. Gerschick, The Body, Disability, and Sexuality, in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays and Interviews , ed. Steven Seidman, Nancy Fischer, and Chet Meeks (New York: Routledge, 2007), 255.

Ibid.

Delores S. Williams, Sisters of the Wilderness (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), 71.