College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics

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 of premarital 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 influenceis perhaps nowhere more evident than on college campuses where hookups—casual sexual encounters devoid of commitment or 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 views of 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 andfulfillment. The spokesperson for this vision is theologian Johann Metz, whose portrait of Jesus enduring his desert temptations 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 discoverin "poverty of spirit" a hopeful, counter-cultural path to authenticity and happiness. Part III culminates 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.

One wonders how far the hook-up culture has spread across university campuses throughout the world. It is clear that students generally, especially if they have faith, should wise up quickly to the social scene they are likely to encounter in higher education, while chaplains and all those responsible for student health and welfare should read this fine book and pursue the call for sexual justice urgently., This is a book that everyone who works on a college campus should read. It is an accurate and candid presentation of what our students face and carry on a daily basis...Beste's writing is clear, accessible, and relatable, making it effective in an introductory-level course yet so rich with insights that it will spark novel comments and questions among advanced students., Beste holds before us an alternative vision of human fulfilment than that enacted in hookup cultures. Inspired by Metz and her students' reflections, she calls for institutional responses based on positive consent and proactive efforts to counter victim blaming. This is a worthwhile book for Christian ethicists who are keen to follow Beste in drawing upon the methods of social anthropology, as well as all who work to care for emerging adults., Beste provides us with deep insight from student ethnographies on two Catholic campuses where she taught...Beste emphasizes the positive role that theology can play. She correctly notes that her book is the first that combines engagement with theological perspectives with student ethnographies., Beste's book is a perfect introduction to anyone wanting to appreciate, understand, and address the problematic campus hookup culture. It cries for course adoption simply because any college course on sexuality would do well to have this pioneering examination of students' lives in their own voices as the primary textbook.

Jennifer Beste is Professor of Theology and Koch Chair of Catholic Thought and Culture at the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, MN. She is the author of God and the Victim: Traumatic Intrusions on Grace and Freedom. Her research interests include trauma theory and Christian theology, ethnography and Christian ethics, sexual ethics, and feminist ethics.