Overview
Today's Christian adolescents and young adults have grown up with fiercely competing narratives about sex, relationships, and fulfillment. Within a Christian world of church services and formal religious education, they have been warned repeatedly about the dangers (or sinfulness) of premarital sex. At the same time, popular culture has inundated them with a very different message: casual sex is fun, thrilling, expected, and no big deal. Jennifer Beste calls into question the widespread assumption that the media's narrative of sex is positively liberating, while a Christian theological account is repressive, sex-negative, and altogether irrelevant. Her argument is based on a qualitative analysis of college students' own accounts of their social and sexual culture. She draws on the reflections of 126 undergraduate students who set out as sober ethnographers to observe and analyze peers at college parties. Overwhelmingly, undergraduates' perspectives challenge a neutral or even benevolent view of hookup culture embraced by some sociologists, ""sex-positive"" feminists, and popular culture in general. Beste goes on to share her own and her students' theological and ethical reflections as they explored the intersection between their social reality, the Christian tradition, and other academic disciplines, and sought to discern more deeply: what it means to become fully human; what constitutes happiness and fulfillment; and how to envision and create more socially and sexually just communities.
Full Product Details
Author: Jennifer Erin Beste (Professor of Theology and Koch Chair of Catholic Thought and Culture, Professor of Theology and Koch Chair of Catholic Thought and Culture, College of Saint Benedict)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 3.30cm
, Length: 15.70cm
Weight: 0.640kg
ISBN: 9780190268503
ISBN 10: 0190268506
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 28 December 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
This book offers an astonishingly new and courageous perspective on questions of sexuality, especially in the context of contemporary student sexual practice in American colleges and universities. Without being 'moralistic, ' Jennifer Beste intriguingly combines student empirical research with both secular and Christian anthropological, theological, and ethical proposals. In its fullness, this is a book that brilliantly probes both pain and pleasure, love and happiness, justice and care, hope and community-illuminated within the complex sphere of human sexuality. --Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics, Yale University Divinity School Few works in Christian sexual ethics draw upon ethnographic methodologies to take into account the perspectives of the moral agents themselves. Professor Beste's study does just that. The amount and richness of the gathered qualitative material alone makes this book well worth the read. But Professor Beste goes well beyond field description to trenchant analysis of the allure and dangers of hook-up culture for young adults. This book will be a benchmark in both ethnographic theology and qualitative sociology on the subject. --Todd Whitmore, Associate Professor, Department of Theology and Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame Beste writes: 'At root is the fundamental fear that vulnerability to being hurt and betrayed represents failure, which has become the greatest social taboo of all.' Risk taboo. Risk knowing the young people around you. Risk reading what you don't want to know. I am an ordained minister and a mother. I teach at a university notorious for hookup culture. Read this book. --Amy Laura Hall, Duke University Divinity School
This book offers an astonishingly new and courageous perspective on questions of sexuality, especially in the context of contemporary student sexual practice in American colleges and universities. Without being 'moralistic, ' Jennifer Beste intriguingly combines student empirical research with both secular and Christian anthropological, theological, and ethical proposals. In its fullness, this is a book that brilliantly probes both pain and pleasure, love and happiness, justice and care, hope and community-illuminated within the complex sphere of human sexuality. --Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics, Yale University Divinity School Few works in Christian sexual ethics draw upon ethnographic methodologies to take into account the perspectives of the moral agents themselves. Professor Beste's study does just that. The amount and richness of the gathered qualitative material alone makes this book well worth the read. But Professor Beste goes well beyond field description to trenchant analysis of the allure and dangers of hook-up culture for young adults. This book will be a benchmark in both ethnographic theology and qualitative sociology on the subject. --Todd Whitmore, Associate Professor, Department of Theology and Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame Beste writes: 'At root is the fundamental fear that vulnerability to being hurt and betrayed represents failure, which has become the greatest social taboo of all.' Risk taboo. Risk knowing the young people around you. Risk reading what you don't want to know. I am an ordained minister and a mother. I teach at a university notorious for hookup culture. Read this book. --Amy Laura Hall, Duke University Divinity School
College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics weaves together original ethnographic research, theological reflection on full human living and loving, and a justice-oriented analysis of sexual norms and campus culture in a way that is engaging, insightful, and thought-provoking even if, at times, it is also unsettling and uncomfortable ... For anyone interested in learning more about student experiences and working toward creating more just and supportive environments for college students, College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics is an engaging and worthwhile read. --Abbylynn Helgevold, Reading Religion This book offers an astonishingly new and courageous perspective on questions of sexuality, especially in the context of contemporary student sexual practice in American colleges and universities. Without being 'moralistic,' Jennifer Beste intriguingly combines student empirical research with both secular and Christian anthropological, theological, and ethical proposals. In its fullness, this is a book that brilliantly probes both pain and pleasure, love and happiness, justice and care, hope and community-illuminated within the complex sphere of human sexuality. --Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics, Yale University Divinity School Few works in Christian sexual ethics draw upon ethnographic methodologies to take into account the perspectives of the moral agents themselves. Professor Beste's study does just that. The amount and richness of the gathered qualitative material alone makes this book well worth the read. But Professor Beste goes well beyond field description to trenchant analysis of the allure and dangers of hook-up culture for young adults. This book will be a benchmark in both ethnographic theology and qualitative sociology on the subject. --Todd Whitmore, Associate Professor, Department of Theology and Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame Beste writes: 'At root is the fundamental fear that vulnerability to being hurt and betrayed represents failure, which has become the greatest social taboo of all.' Risk taboo. Risk knowing the young people around you. Risk reading what you don't want to know. I am an ordained minister and a mother. I teach at a university notorious for hookup culture. Read this book. --Amy Laura Hall, Duke University Divinity School
Author Information
Jennifer Beste is Professor of Theology and holds the Koch Chair in Catholic Thought and Culture at the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, MN. She is the author of God and the Victim: Traumatic Intrusions on Grace and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her research interests include trauma theory and Christian theology; ethnography and Christian ethics; sexual ethics; feminist ethics; and children, justice, and Catholicism.
