College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics: The Lives and Longings of Emerging Adults

College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics: The Lives and Longings of Emerging Adults
ISBN-10
0190268506
ISBN-13
9780190268503
Category
Education
Pages
368
Language
English
Published
2017
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Jennifer Erin Beste

Description

In America, Christian adolescents and young adults have grown up with fiercely competing narratives about sex, relationships, and fulfillment. Within a Christian world of church services, formal religious education, and retreats, they have been warned about the dangers and sinfulness ofpremarital sex. All the while, popular culture has inundated them with a very different message: casual sex is fun, thrilling, expected, and no-big-deal. Popular culture's influence is perhaps nowhere more evident than on college campuses where hookups - casual sexual encounters devoid of commitmentor emotional attachment - have become the norm for emerging adults. College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics engages 126 college students as sober ethnographers whose task is to observe and analyze their own complex social reality. Part I reveals students' disillusionment with contemporary sexual and relational norms, challenging benevolent or even neutral viewsof hookup culture. Part II brings the students into conversation with Christianity's counter-cultural narrative of what it means to become fully human and experience genuine joy and fulfillment. The spokesperson for this vision is theologian Johann Metz, whose portrait of Jesus enduring his deserttemptations and becoming fully human resonates profoundly with today's college students. Comparing Jesus' way of being in the world with their college culture's status quo, many undergraduates discover in "poverty of spirit" a hopeful, counter-cultural path to authenticity and happiness. Part IIIculminates in a call to action. Students explore obstacles to sexual justice on college campuses, identify key commitments necessary for change, and envision how undergraduates can work to create the college culture they truly desire and deserve.

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