One of the most important aspects in our lives is learning how to have mutual, caring romantic relationships. Yet while schools and many other industries in this country devote tremendous attention and resources to preparing the young for work, they do remarkably little to prepare them for generous, self-respecting sex and love. Educators and…

Based on a real teaching experience in the classroom, the author reflects on the dynamics of gender, race/ethnicity, power, and privilege in the context of an undergraduate course in Christian sexual ethics. Through this analysis of pedagogical style and process initiated by a challenging moment at the midpoint of the semester, the author develops…

"The talk" is culturally understood to mean a discussion whereby both partners in a relationship reveal their feelings about each other and their commitment to a future together. Typically, one partner feels a greater need to clarity the future and instigates "the talk." This study reports the analysis of a 15 item…

We are in an unprecedented age of technology. Few articles in family journals address online behavior, intimacy patterns, and influences on the ways couples and families communicate through technology. The purpose of this article is to use a multitheoretical model to describe the process of how technologies are affecting couple and family life.…

A "native" Christian ethnographer finds religious education at this church-sponsored school to pursue two distinct, and occasionally conflicting, curricula: "love" and "purity." The curriculum of love draws on what Turner called liminality and communitas in an effort to promote spiritual "encounters with…

Being a feminist teacher, working on gender equity education, including teaching, reading, writing, and doing research on this topic, has become a commitment for me. I have frequently reflected my teaching practices and occasionally found new teaching strategies in the classroom. I always try to bring new topics or issues into the classroom in…

Treatment programs for serious offenders such as sex offenders typically include an empathy training component as part of a comprehensive intervention package. The reasons for doing so are partly based on research evidence indicating that social disconnection and relationship ruptures related to empathy failures often trigger offending, and also…

The protection of children from harm is commonly accepted as the cardinal duty of parents. In the USA, where young people's sexuality is often regarded with anxiety, attempts to restrict adolescent sexual behaviour are seen as ethically justified and even required of "good" parents. Running counter to popular anxiety surrounding young…

In recent years the concept of eros has found its way back into educational literature with the aim of integrating human desires into educational theories and counteracting a devaluation of emotional life. This paper holds the view that this integration is important because desire expresses a fundamental way of relating to the world. However, part…

Macmurray's distinction between communities, which are positive and personal, and societies, which are negative and impersonal, along with his insistence that schools are necessarily communities, like families and friendship groups, provides the basis for his claim that we may act as though we were teaching arithmetic or history, but in fact we…

Group work literature acknowledges that the group co-leader relationship influences the development of group members and the group as a whole. However, little direction has been offered for supervisors of group co-leaders to facilitate the development of the co-leader relationship. Reis and Shaver's (1988) interpersonal process model of intimacy…

College counseling clinicians need to understand how students use technology to form, sustain, and end romantic attachments. Students now frequently incorporate aspects of these technologically based interactions, or mediated communications, into counseling sessions and often make important attributions based on them. Heavy daily use of a growing…

Popular cultures are key sites Philip Deloria has called the "production of expectations," and as a major form of popular culture, film has figured prominently in the circulation and reproduction of expectations about Native American peoples since the early twentieth century. This paper explores the ideologies and practices involved in the process…

This article presents the integrative soul mates relationship development model, which provides the helping professionals with a conceptual map for couples' relationship development from dating, to intimacy, to soul mating, and long-term flourishing. This model is informed by a holistic, a developmental, and a positive psychology conceptualization…

Clergy often begin their ministerial careers unprepared to handle issues of professional power, sexuality and intimacy, and interpersonal boundaries. In response, denominational bodies and theological schools are seeking together ways to enhance the teaching of "professional sexual ethics"--referring to the integration of professional ethics,…