CHRISTIAN IDENTITY AND SEXUAL IDENTITY
Adult Education
Series, Ardmore Presbyterian Church, Winter 2013
Sunday February 3 –
Sunday March 24
7:00 p.m. – 8:30
p.m., A.P.C. Parish House
In 2011 the PC(USA) voted to remove
from its constitution the requirement that church leaders live either in
fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity
in singleness. In wake of that decision,
as well as the more recent endorsement of gay marriage in several states, this
adult education mini-course is designed to be a safe forum in which to learn
some of the science and social science of sexuality and sexual orientation, and
to discuss this in the context of the Biblical drama of creation, fall,
redemption, and future hope.
Our primary text will be Messiah
College anthropologist Jenell W. Paris’s book, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex is Too Important to Define Who We
Are (InterVarsity Press, 2011). In
addition, there will be a password-protected website for the class, where supplementary
materials will be posted. This class is
open both to A.P.C. members and interested college students and other members
of the community, with the understanding that all who attend will interact with
charity, confidentiality, and mutual respect, and will commit, as far as
possible, to reading the assigned book portions before each meeting.
The leader for the series will be
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Ph.D., social psychologist and recent chair of the
psychology department at Eastern University.
She is the author or co-author of seven books on gender, family, and
practical theology, and was for ten years prior to 2000 a member of the
Religion, Culture and Family Project at the University of Chicago Divinity
School. She has been teaching the Psychology
of Gender to students at public and Christian universities for over thirty
years.
