Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics - Tapa dura

'Meeting the anticipation of at least ten years, Margaret Farley has published her book on sexual ethics and just love. It has been well worth the wait ... What distinguishes a contribution and a classic in a field of study is that it both furthers a conversation and reconstructs it. This is why classics are - and should be - read broadly by those within and outside of a field of study, by experts and the general reader. This is why Farley's Just Love is, at the least, a contemporary classic in Christian sexual ethics.' Timothy F. Sedgwick, Anglican Theological Seminary, May 2007 'This is an excellent work by a leading Roman Catholic feminist and ethicist, written with flair, clarity, and absence of jargon. The many changing circumstances surrounding sexuality are well described. The influence of Foucault and Freud is critically introduced. The Christian traditions of thinking abut sex, and their indebtedness to Graeco-Roman assumptions, are helpfully summarised...This is a compassionate, very readable, Christian book, and a comprehensive introduction to Christian sexual ethics.'--Adrian Thatcher, Church Times, February 2007 "Church Times " Reference & Research Book News/ August 2006--mention Winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Religion. mentioned in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2006 Mention of title winning Grawemeyer Religion Award in Earth Times, December 2007 "This book is a serious primer for anyone who wants to think about sexual ethics in some depth. The scholarship is impeccable, and the footnotes not only give the broad sources but are often interesting in themselves." - Catholic Herald 'In a world of moral confusion and ethical compromise, the principles for which Margaret Farley stands have shone as a lodestar of hope. Or perhaps like a beacon, for her life and work guide us though the haze of uncertainty in which we nowadays perforce live, leading us always toward the good and the real.' - Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Live and How We Die. Reference & Research Book News/ August 2006--, "Farley (Yale Divinity School) offers a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of sexuality and sexual ethics, capping it with a proposal for a revisioned contemporary Christian sexual ethic. The book draws heavily throughout on her feminist perspective, and endeavors to balance Scripture, religious tradition, and insights of secular disciplines and contemporary experience in providing a framework based on a somewhat qualified definition of justice as the foundation for norms of love and sex.." "CHOICE February 2007" " " Reference & Research Book News/ August 2006--Sanford Lakoff "Farley's eagerly anticipated book delivers exactly what it ambitiously promises: a framework for Christian sexual ethics.... Consistent with her earlier works, such as "Personal Commitments "(1986) and "An Ethics for Same-Sex Relations" (in "A Challenge to Love "[1983]). Through them all she is developing tools by which we can thoroughly and thoughtfully evaluate practices within their particular situations and cultural contexts, rather than laying out permanent norms (which she believes often function as taboos, short-circulating moral reflection). New here is her careful demonstration of means for employing diverse contemporary, global, and cumulative Western thinking on sexuality. For the benefit of students and informed general readers F. efficiently surveys the important primary and secondary sources but she also performs a subtle service for specialists.... Her broad norms and caveats are clear and convincing; copious footnotes guide the reader to all the major sources and controversies in the Western history and ethics of sexuality, and to many global ones. The book is highly recommended for scholars in the field and for graduate students as an introduction to ethical method generally."- Cristina L. H. Traina, "Theological Studies"--Sanford Lakoff Just Love carries to a new level Farley's analysis of different world-views and cultural systems....As a theologian, Farley gives us a social ethic of sex that incorporates both the biblical "option for the poor" and the orientation of Catholic social thought to the universal common good. As a feminist, she reminds Catholics that their tradition should make its global option for women more consistent, more explicit and more effective, especially in the areas of sex, motherhood, marriage and family.' Lisa Sowell Cahill, America, December 2006--Sanford Lakoff "Farley is best known for her largeness of spirit and for the demanding intelligence she brings to her teaching and writing. Her new book exudes those qualities...Farley's manner is academic but not obscure, and once readers grow comfortable with it, they will reap the benefits of wisdom gleaned from decades of teaching and scholarship...I consider Just Love an important resource and spur for further collaboration among Christians and others on the knotty issues of sexual ethics. Throughout her book, Farley evinces the sort of intellectual modesty that comes from great learning and an open mind....Just Love does not provide all the answers concerning sexual ethics. But it does lay out a serious and solid framework for thinking about them."--Sanford Lakoff "Commonweal " "Just Love responds eloquently to the quest for enduring meanings of embodiment, gender identity, and sexuality that might ground moral wisdom in the face of cultural diversity and a growing skepticism about the adequacy of normative frameworks in sexual ethics...Farley has written a text that is at once compassionate and wise, inclusive, and moving. She draws on poetry as well as philosophy, historical studies, scientific research, and the meanings of sexuality. Theologians and their advance students, pastoral guides, and adults searching for wisdom in relationships will all appreciate this book." Rosemarie E. Gorman, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, April 2007--Sanford Lakoff "This important book by Margaret A. Farley, professor emerita of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School and member of the Sisters of Mary, won the prestigious Grawemeyer award, administered by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary...Young people, parents, and pastors are challenged to work together to help us all lead sexually responsible lives in the light of Farley's challenge to practice 'just love.'" -The American Catholic--Sanford Lakoff "she intelligently examines the evidence surrounding the questions from a variety of perspectives ...The book is broad enough to be relevant and appeal to a wider audience than solely the Christian...The book is very readable." INTAMS ( Journal for the study of Marriage and Spirituality), vol.13/2, autumn 2007--Sanford Lakoff "Margaret Farley's Just Love won the 2008 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religio...The award is well deserved for Just Love, which takes the powerful idea that justice is the criterion for morally good human love and applies it to sexual ethics in a style that is clear yet substantive, learned yet free of academic jargon" "Just Kove forwards a substantive framework for thinking about sexual ethics and handles concrete moral issues with sensivity and compassion. This volume will become a standard in university ethics courses and should be welcomed as a resource for parish adult education groups" 1 July 2009--Sanford Lakoff "Theology " "This spring I taught a course to undergraduates at Macalester College on the topic "Religion, Gender, and Sexuality," in which Farley's book was a required text. In that context it proved to be an invaluable tool for two reasons. First, it provided my students with clear and readable summaries of much literature already covered but which is not as stylistically lucid as Farley's prose. Second, her book was a marvellous manual for teaching students what goes into the making of an ethical argument and how they might go about constructing such a normative position on secular ethics for themselves. Since most of the secular literature we read was mainly of a descriptive or explanatory nature, while the religious and theological literature articulated those normative views on gender and sexuality that are problematic for this current generation of college students, Farley helped them to synthesize various contemporary viewpoints critical of the Christian tradition with a revised approach to ethical reflection. Her book validates the experiential and intellectual reasons persons have to be critical of the church's inherited sexual morality, at the same time that she clarifies why Christian faith itself provides a warrant for ethical revision on behalf of its distinctive vision of what human life may and should be when lived out of a love that just is. There is no better book on Christian sexual ethics. Tolle, lege take and read." Paul E. Capetz, Touchstone--Sanford Lakoff "In 2008, Margaret Farley received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her achievement in Just Love. This prize, which places Just Love in the company of works such as Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Jurgen Moltmann's The Coming of God, indicates the respect the book commands...Just Love represents both a contribution to the developing literature of relational ethics and a 'creative reconstruction' of the natural law tradition, broadly conceived...Reflecting on the natural realities of human nature and experience, she outlines a universally applicable justice ethic and undertakes to identify common ground upon which all persons of good will can reason together about moral perplexities relating to our interactions as embodied, gendered, sexual beings...This book, then, consolidates and systematizes the central themes and intentions of Margaret Farley's truly remarkable career."-D.M. Yeager, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sept. 2009 "This book is a gigantic contribution to the discourse and understanding of human sexuality. It is monumental. It turns the entrenched dictates of the Vatican on their head...opens the subject of sex to rational discourse by Christian people, and acknowledges the direction from which the source of light comes reason and science informed by just love open to all." Richard Sipe

This long-awaited book by one of American Christianity's foremost ethicists proposes a framework for sexual ethics whereby justice is the criterion for all loving, including love that is related to sexual activity and relationships.