Grace's Third Way
Andy Crouch
March 21, 2005
Ethics is a surprisingly popular topic these days. Not too long ago, ethics was the dusty domain of philosophers. To be sure, "situation ethics" created a stir when it seeped into public education in the seventies. (Ninth graders were asked to populate a lifeboat with a diverse collection of people, then argue about who should be thrown to the sharks first. Which does sound a lot like ninth grade.) But in the eighties and early nineties, ethics took a holiday-unless you count Wall Street's "Greed is good." Ethics is at bottom about mapping the intersection between two sets-what we can do and what we ought to do. And from biotechnology to business, the first set has dramatically expanded in the past few years. The result is a resurgence of interest in ethics (and jobs for ethicists). In intensive-care wards, laboratories, boardrooms, and even a weekly column ("The Ethicist," naturally) in The New York Times Magazine, ethics is hot stuff. For Christians, there is no more combustible area of ethics than human sexuality. As in other areas, the surge of interest in sexual ethics is driven by the suddenly expanded territory of the possible. Marriage, the traditional context for sexuality, has been marginalized by cohabitation on one end and stigma-free divorce on the other. Media technology, including the Internet, have brought endless sexual options into our living rooms (my spam in the past two weeks has brought invitations to consume depictions of bestiality, rape, and under-age sex with both boys and girls, as well as the more conventional delights that are already available on cable TV). Contraceptive technologies and legal abortion have allowed heterosexuals to catch up to the sexual freedom that homosexuals have long enjoyed. ...
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