Teaching Sexuality on the Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn toward the Longue Durée

Abstract

I present a close reading of the Catholics & Cultures (C&C) website’s treatment of sexuality-related issues and discuss this material in relation to debates about how to teach sexuality in religious studies and theology classrooms. The C&C website occasionally and intermittently uses a typical “contemporary issues” approach that considers sexuality in relation to legal and legislative decisions and government policies. In contrast, country profiles consistently situate sexuality in relation processes like nation building, urbanization, and lay Catholics’ growing authority. My interpretation highlights the site’s decision to emphasize the longue durée, long-term and deep structural processes driving cultural and religious changes. Certainly, advocates of including sexuality in religious studies and theology curricula would applaud the C&C website for explicitly acknowledging lay Catholics’ attitudes about issues like same-sex marriage, the use of new reproductive technologies, the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, and pre-marital sexuality and reproduction. The site also offers a refreshing alternative to commonplace ways of enacting a religious studies and theology pedagogy of sexuality.