Customer Reviews

The Poetics of Intimacy & the Problem of Sexual Abstinence

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Those who take the tradition of Christian sexual ethics seriously may occasionally wonder whether recent approaches actually help Christians to love others as God has loved them. Michael Haretwig takes both Catholic and Protestant ethical traditon seriously. However he recognizes how the approach of the last several centuries actually inhibits or even cripples Christians' ability to love intimately. He examines the tradition critically, develops a new model and applies that model to the situation in which we find ourselves at the beginning of this century. As a gay man Dr. Hartwig pays more attention to how this paradigm applies to gays and lesbians than others might. However he also applies it to heterosexuals and to people with disabilities with equally challenging and nourishing results. His scholarship is so rigorous that it will be difficult for others to ignore his work. Dr. Hartwig may indeed be providing the paradigm of Christian sexual ethics that will become the norm for the 21st century. Well worth the high price.

Having experienced Michael Hartwig during my time at Holy Trinity Seminary when he was college rector and I was a college student, it is clear that the aim of Mr. Hartwig is to try and excuse any form of promiscuity and declare it 'normal' and any emphasis on celibacy to be restrictive and abnormal. He is attempting to adjust the politics of sex to influence the Vatican in some way. Using his sophistry allows almost any illogic on ethics--or lack of same--to sound valid. I think he fails miserably and can't imagine why he hasn't been laicized or excommunicated by Rome, to finally put a rejection imprimatur upon this guy. I survived the attitude of HTS and this sort of mentality in the mid-80's. You don't have to survive this work.