Mark D. Jordan

The Ethics of Sex is an excellently argued and imminently accessible book. Jordan traces the themes of Christian sexual ethics through their development in the Catholic church. He focuses on how the church has created various sexual roles for the faithful to play ranging from the virgin martyr, to the husband and wife, to the enigmatic figure of the sodomite. The crux of the matter is that these roles, and the disciplinary regimes that keep them in place, are foreign to the contemporary ethical world and can not be naively lifted out of there context and dropped into the modern discussion. For people, for instance, would accept the attitude that heterosexual marriage is -- at best -- pressure value to release lust, lest it become fornication, but this is, in fact, the opinion of the vast majority of the Christian tradition.

Jordan's work is deconstructive in nature. His goal is to clear the field of the debris of previous battles in order to allow for fresh conversation, and he makes few firm suggestions for how to proceed with that new conversation. However, I highly recommend this work to anyone who is seriously attempting to construct a sexual ethic -- whether for personal or pastoral reasons.… (more)