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

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”