Honest Sex
Honest Sex
Rustum & Della Roy
This book presents a Christian view of sex-but one radically different from
what has become the traditional church position toward this vital area of human experience. The authors and their as-
sociates in the Sycamore Community-many of them scientists-are a group of Christian humanists committed to
giving their religion meaning in the modern world. Over three years of wide research,
intense discussion, and searching analysis have gone into the creation of a bold
new sexual ethic that is both in harmony with the basic tenets of Christianity and
in key with rapidly changing social realities.
For society is changing, dramatically so-the book emphasizes this essential fact. Advances in contraception, increasing leisure time, the decline of censorship, the new equality of the sexes, all contribute to an ever-accelerating sexual revolution. In this environment, a church identifying itself with the morality of the Victorian era is doomed to irrelevance. What this book makes clear is that Christianity must reject its ties to the mores of a bygone age if it is to continue to perform its ministry to man. It must return to the fundamental spiritual truths and human needs that brought it into being.
In this light the book examines such problems as premarital and extramarital
sex, birth control, divorce, sex among adolescents, wife-swapping, polygamy, homosexuality, and many other of the most thorny issues. Its conclusions
eschew both rigid rules and unlimited permissiveness; instead it outlines an ethical framework within which the
individual can make decisions in a world where sex is not an isolated sphere of human activity, but an integral part of
personal growth and interpersonal
responsibility. To many this book and what it says will be highly controversial-as
controversial as the pronouncements of the "New Morality" and "situation-ethic" theologians whom it quotes with
approval. But it is a book that takes an
important place in the mainstream of modern religious humanism, a book that demands to be read-both for the cogent
questions it raises and the challenging answers it proposes.