Wednesday, December 19, 2012

One Body: released

Amazon now has One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics in stock, though they say they only have seven copies left and more are on the way.

I got my copies yesterday. They look nice. Here's the blurb from Amazon:

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body.

One Body begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics.


"This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms." —Robert P. George, Princeton University


"One Body is an excellent piece of philosophical-theological reflection on the nature of sexuality and marriage. This book has the potential to become a standard go-to text for professors and students working on sex ethics issues, whether in philosophy or theology, both for the richness of its arguments, and the scope of its coverage of cases. " —Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina


"Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake." —John Finnis, University of Oxford

An electronic version (PDF) can be purchased directly from the press.

8 comments:

  1. Congratulations Alex! It's on my Christmas list.

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  2. If you have time, check out my blog at www.cognitiveparfait.wordpress.com

    Christian perspective. I try to answer questions regarding various topics, including homosexuality and abortion.

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  3. Congratulations Alex! I have a friend who does Christian counseling and she is interested in a copy.

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  4. I have a question about something in the book. In the book, you say that the good of sexual pleasure is the reproductive striving of the organs. There are some species of fish, like salmon, however, that exhibit ovuliparity. This means that the fish lays eggs in the water, and then the other fish releases semen into the water to fertilize them. This doesn't seem like the mutual striving of the organs, for the organs don't really interact and are separate. How would you respond to this?

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  5. Well, the organs of the male and female still work together, even if the organs don't work on each other.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. You define pleasure in your book as the perception of a good. Would you define pain then as a perception of a bad?

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