Margaret Farley Just Love Summary

Review of Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics

Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. By Margaret A. Farley. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Xiv + 322 pages. N.P.

Margaret A. Farley, a Sister of Mercy and a leading ethicist, taught Christian ethics at Yale University Divinity School from 1971 to 2007, where she held the Gilbert L. Stark Chair in Christian Ethics. Farley was the first woman appointed to serve full-time on the Yale School Board. In 2006, she published an insightful yet controversial book on Christian sexual ethics named Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Later, this book was used as a textbook in college courses on sexual ethics and helped her become a winner of the 2008 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Farley is a past president of both the Society of Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America, and a recipient of the John Courtney Murray Award in 1992. Among the other six books she has written or co-written are A Study in the Ethics of Commitment within the

Context of Theories of Human Love and Temporality (1978), Personal Commitments: Beginning, Keeping, Changing (1986), and Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics and Other Questions (2002).
Margaret Farley's Just Love has been awaited by many in the field of Christian ethics. The most noticeable difference between Just Love and other books in Christian sexual ethics is that it does not begin with the sexual teachings of the Christian tradition but instead consults Christian tradition as one of a number of sources. For decades, most sexual ethics texts have been structured around Christian sexual teachings by scholars attempting to explain how one of these teachings had become problematic and should be reformed. Though much of the Christian sexual tradition seems to be impaired by a deep-rooted prejudice against women and a body/soul dualism that scorns all physical things, Farley moves beyond refuting and dismissing this tradition and engages the strengths of the Christian moral tradition: its teachings on holiness, justice, and love in relationships with God and with others.
The question Farley poses in various ways throughout her book is “When is sexual activity appropriate in human relationships?” (272). In consideration of this question, she divides her book into seven chapters. First, she begins her book with surveys of the theories of Foucault and MacKinnon, of historical perspectives on sexuality in Greece, Rome, Judaism, and early Christian traditions, and of philosophy and medicine. After considering the insights of sexuality in history in chapter 2, Farley moves to a cross-cultural and interreligious survey on sexuality in chapter 3. She further complicates and enriches the quest for useful sources for theories of sexuality in South Sea Islands, African culture, Hinduism and Islam.
An important move in her book takes place in chapter 4, where three concerns occupy Farley's attention: “the moral status of the human body,” “the question of gender,” and “the sources and aims of sexual desire” (109).

Farley first elevates the moral status of the body by speaking about it in incarnational terms. Rejecting hierarchical dualisms that make humanity reducible to “soul over body” or “form over matter,” she constructs the mirror terminologies of “embodied spirits” and “inspirited bodies” (116). Next, she roots her emerging concept of Just Love, that is, love that takes full account of the whole person. Then, Farley suggests that gender is always socially constructed. Finally, she situates sexual desire within her definition of love, which she understands “simultaneously as affective response, an effective way of being in union, and an affective affirmation of what is loved”

(168).