Leaving and Coming Home: New Wineskins for Catholic Sexual Ethics

SINCE 2002 THE SYMPOSIUM NEW WINE NEW WINESKINS HAS OFFERED AN OPPORTUNITY for young Catholic moral theologians to engage in shared work and conversation. Here the fruits of these labors are gathered into one collection which represents the wide scope of the future of Catholic sexual ethics. This volume offers the first collection of a new generations approaches to Catholic sexual ethics. The collection displays young scholars with diverse views yet whose work moves beyond the impasses that have beset the field. The volume offers original and engaging essays on a variety of topics from the hook-up culture and dating violence to cohabitation and homosexuality to contraception and natural family planning to the promises and pitfalls of the theology of the body. The authors display a fresh engagement with these issues in conversation with the Christian tradition and with contemporary culture. David Cloutier provides an introduction that locates this work within the past decades of Catholic scholarship and articulates new categories for future work. The essays also offer practical insights and models that will interest pastors and lay ministers as well as scholars. In this excellent collection of essays on sexuality and marriage we see emerging theological voices effectively move beyond the impasse of a previous generation. These authors both acknowledge the deep influence of contemporary culture on Christian understandings of sex and marriage and critically respond with a surprisingly sophisticated set of theological resources. Alternatively fascinating and disconcerting this collection has a real chance to seriously engage a hooked up and pornified undergraduate culture. An excellent resource for teaching. --JOHN BERKMAN Associate Professor of Moral Theology Regis College University of Toronto Leaving and Coming Home is a breath of fresh air in Catholic moral thinking about sexuality. The authors take the warring personalisms of decades past and present and nest them in the setting of home. The resulting essays suitable for use in both undergraduate and graduate moral theology courses offer refreshing takes on hard questions. --WILLIAM L. PORTIER Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology University of Dayton By countering the trivialization as well as overly glorified accounts of sex and marriage the authors of Leaving and Coming Home convincingly argue that any Christian understanding of sexuality and marriage must be incorporated into a theology of discipleship and connected to the practices of the Christian life. Challenging and engaging each of the essays offers a liberating alternative to contemporary notions of sex and marriage by demonstrating that the fundamental purpose of both is to deepen our ability to love God and neighbor. --PAUL J. WADELL Professor of Religious Studies St. Norbert College De Pere Wisconsin Leaving and Coming Home offers wide-ranging treatments and fresh perspectives on issues in sexual ethics both new and old. The blend of voices from different points on the theological spectrum is harmonized in a shared attention to practices--understood not just as sociological descriptions of human behaviors but as productive of virtue and vice within persons and communities. An excellent addition to college or introductory graduate courses on marriage or sexual ethics. --JOHN S. GRABOWSKI Associate Professor of Moral Theology/Ethics The School of Theology and Religious Studies The Catholic University of America David Cloutier is Associate Professor of Theology at Mount St. Marys University in Emmitsburg MD. He is the author of Love Reason and Gods Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (2008) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on sexual ethics and moral theology.