Embracing Sexuality

Over the past few decades our experience and understanding of human sexuality has changed remarkably. The women's movement, the gay rights movement, and a growing social tolerance for diverse lifestyles - the landscape in which we view human sexuality - has been greatly altered. Cohabitation, experimental relationships, and remarriage after divorce are all practices that scandalize our grandparents but seem normal to our children. Yet, the mainstream Christian Churches appear to have been little more than bystanders in the midst of this revolution. Roman Catholic teaching on sexual and marital morality has not substantially changed since 1968, the date of Paul VI's encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae. This book represents an attempt to initiate a meaningful conversation between the institutional Church and the laity about some of the fundamental and concrete issues involving human sexuality and relationships. Drawing upon both their professional expertise and their personal experience, eleven authors invite the hierarchy and the whole community of the Church to reconsider their understanding and appreciation for this vital dimension of human existence. The first part of the book suggests three different ways to approach the understanding of human sexuality, in terms of relationship, spirituality and our bodily existence. Part two examines three critical but frequently neglected experiences of sexuality, that of women, of young persons and of the homosexual community. Part three takes account of how human sexuality has been evaluated in the eyes of the Christian Churches; and part four considers how the Churches might 'embrace' human sexuality in a manner that speaks to contemporary women and men in the context of their lived experience.