The Right True End of Love: Sexuality and the Contemporary Church

The current arguments about homosexuality often seem to create more heat than light. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Stephen White begins with the premise that the church is attempting to do sexual ethics without first of all examining the theological underpinning of our ideas of right and wrong as seen in the nature of God. From this consideration he proposes guiding qualities of creativity and love as the basis for a new framework of Christian sexual ethics which would have major implications for the ongoing debate on homosexuality in particular, but also for the church's own self-understanding and ecclesiological identity. Stephen White's attack on the valuation of sexuality and sexual ethics that we have received from the Christian past is always sharp, and sometimes savage. All the more telling, then, is the fact that it comes from a rather conservative churchman.--Don Cupitt, University of Cambridge ""Whether or not you will come to agree with all of Stephen White's conclusions, The Right True End of Love is a compelling and provocative read. He argues coherently but almost boisterously for the church to do ethics in a new way as it approaches the moral minefields of human sexuality. This is not a polite book but it is certainly saying some of the things which must be said and heard if the Irish church is to retain any credibility or motivation in an unfolding new century.""--Richard Clarke, Bishop of Meath and Kildare