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Sex and the Soul: Judging Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses
by Donna Freitas
Oxford University Press, April 2008
336 pp. $19.99
I teach a course on the sociology of sexuality, and my students are surprisingly open about their fears and hopes surrounding sexuality. For the most part, they confirm Donna Freitas's latest research: While students at evangelical schools struggle to know how to live with sexual desire, they are at least looking for their faith to inform their entire lives, including their sexual choices.
Freitas, who taught a course on dating at St. Michael's College, interviewed 111 students and received more than 2,500 responses to an online survey on sex and spirituality. What emerges in Sex and the Soul (Oxford University Press) is a disturbing yet hopeful picture of the sexual and spiritual lives of today's college students. Freitas studied two evangelical universities, two Catholic universities, two private nonreligious schools, and one public university. Since stark differences emerged between evangelical schools and the rest, she clustered observations using the terms evangelical and spiritual schools. (Freitas assumes all schools are somewhat rooted in spirituality, hence her book's title.)
The idea for Freitas's research project emerged from a classroom conversation about hookup culture, defined as casual sexual encounters unencumbered by the burden of love or commitment. Freitas's research confirmed the ubiquity of her class's response: Hookup culture may be prominent on many campuses, but not because the majority of students want it that way.
At the spiritual schools, religious beliefs did not influence sexual choices much at all. Seventy-three percent of ...
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Daniel
What were the schools? When the number of schools you pick in each category are so small, then the author practically accuses herself of selection on the dependent variable. The statistics and Franciscan University and Georgetown University and Catholic University in America are all going to be very different, as are the statistics at Calvin versus Union versus Gordon, as are the statistics at the University of Minnesota versus the University of Virginia versus UC Berkeley. So.... I will not be reading this book because the data will ultimately be meaningless.
Isaiah Tor
Whilst their is a place of such safe places of "confession", we must realize that could only be a pained attempt in the aftermath to rescue if possible, a young person, after he or she has already participated in sexual behaviour that has severely shattered his or her relationship with the Lord. Sexual sins are very much hated by God, to the extent that even David's sin in robbing Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah was still recorded in Matthew 1. Perhaps one may say it is absolutely impossible to be pure in this age. Regarding this I point the Christian to 2 Timothy 2:21-22. We all need His mercy and grace in this, in the realization that we are all sinners in desperate need of His grace not only in mighty deliverances from severe temptation, but much more a daily salvation from this most damaging of sins that we would live in His presence unceasingly until we meet Him at the end of this age at His second coming. May the young people of America would so love God seek Him purely
AKR
Call me a prude but the statistics are a bit shocking to me. Having grown up in evangelical church in the 90's, and attended a public university and then graduate school, I'm often stumped by how little anyone of "authority" is willing to discuss sexuality honestly. It's often left to professors, who honestly are really not equipped to counsel wisely, and many of them strident with their politics only serve to alienate the students even more. It saddens me that we are at a point in history where we are looking at numbers to verify what a new generation is experiencing in their sexuality, but it's even sad that we are at a point where over 70% of students in most schools have experienced sex of some kind, and have no faith to lean upon. The stats on the Catholic schools are even more surprising, and why such a disparity when compared to evangelical schools? What's the difference?