***This workshop is filled; to be placed on the waiting list, please email Alaena.***
Fresh Moral Wisdom about Sexuality and Sexual Ethics
With Rev. Marvin Ellison
6 Contact Hours for LCSW’s
In the midst of seemingly endless cultural conflict about difference, many people find themselves struggling to make sense of sex and sexuality, shifting gender roles and expectations, and increasingly diverse relational and family patterns. What’s normal (and not), how do we figure that out, and are those even the right questions to ask?
While many reject a rule-based morality full of prohibitions and fear-based judgments, they may also be uncomfortable with an “anything goes” approach. What language and interpretive framework might help us articulate a relational ethic that focuses on things that matter (i.e., dynamics of power and vulnerability, especially among those marginalized)? What moral wisdom from religious and spiritual traditions might help us gain our bearings about these concerns?
To explore these questions, this workshop will first examine challenges to the prevailing sex/gender paradigm (and efforts to map out a post-modern approach more open to difference and a multiplicity of human sexualities), and then examine fresh thinking about sexual ethics in light of contemporary movements for sexual, gender, and reproductive justice.
About the Workshop presenter:
Marvin Ellison, an ordained Presbyterian minister and (now retired) professor of Christian social ethics at Bangor Theological Seminary, is a scholar-activist and educator for justice whose most recent publication is “Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times” (Fortress Press). He serves as a volunteer chaplain for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and a board member for both the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence and the Eleanor Humes Haney Fund, which provides grants to grassroots social justice organizations in Maine.
