Teaching Ethics of Sex with Tenderness: Religious Literacy and Sexual Literacy in the Undergraduate Classroom

Abstract

Critically reflecting on a “pedagogy of tenderness”, this essay delineates how to build a liberative community of learning in the undergraduate classroom of sexual ethics. The learning community aims to help students understand religion's complex roles in shaping sexual ethics in society, challenge heteropatriarchal sexual ethics through globally disenfranchised people's experiences, and develop a gender-and-sexuality sensitive discourse on social justice. The classroom can be a site for a communal journey toward healing and liberation from sexual violence and religious sexual oppression.