Customer Reviews

Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics

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Rudy's take on gender theology and how we as Christians can move past it are at once liberating and a little bit scary. I wholeheartedly agree with her call to return to the community of the Christian church, that our relationships should be based around baptism, not family, and that how we relate to God and to each other should be not be based on our gender or sexuality. Her concept of what constitutes moral sex, though, needs to be studied with care. To base the morality of the sex act on community needs and hospitality invites a misread that would sanction all sorts of irresponsible sex acts under the guise of "communal sex." I don't necessarily disagree, but I think a more thorough explanation of what exactly this version of moral sex does and does not look like would have been in order.

Kathy Rudy's book is subtitled, Gender, Homosexuality and theTransformation of Christian Ethics. From that one might think thatthe thrust of the book would be about how the Church can transform her moral sexual ethics. However, half the book is spent on analyzing the position of the Christian Right. While this part seemed well documented, one wonders whether that should have been given as much space given the stated focus of the book. Only in the last chapter does Rudy actually deal with complementarity, unitivity and her addition to the ethic, hospitality.

Her detailed analysis of the Christian Right is perceptive, but that same attention to detail is skipped in the last chapter.

The book was disappointing in the sense that the title and subtitle seemed to suggest another kind of approach. END