The Story
Local Chaplains Open Dialogue on Sexuality
Three of the College of William and Mary’s chaplains want to start a dialogue about sex.
The “Our Whole Lives” curriculum, or OWL, was jointly developed by the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association to address issues of sexuality and spirituality within their congregations. A modified version of the course designed for eighteen to twenty-two year olds will be taught this fall by Episcopal chaplain Father John Maxwell Kerr, Unitarian Universalist Director of Lifespan Faith Development Margaret Sequeira, and Presbyterian Director of Campus Ministry Gini Campbell.
Kerr, who, like Sequeira, has taught the course before, wanted to bring it to William and Mary after noticing that his conversations with students tended to focus on two issues: sex and money.
“Sex ed is taught in high school,” Kerr said, “but there it’s mostly about plumbing, not relationships.” According to Kerr, the beliefs of many young people about sex are “not current” and “medically inaccurate.”
“There are people in this college whose idea of sex is exploitative. Kerr said. “Many families teach their children next to nothing about sex, so what they learn, they learn from hearsay. Sexuality is too important, too beautiful, and too dangerous for there to be widespread ignorance about it.”
Sequeira agrees. “There frequently is a gap in knowledge, which is often filled by friends. People think whatever you got in high school will serve you your entire life, but the questions you have as an adult may be different from the questions you have when you’re fourteen.”
For the chaplains, last year’s controversy over the Sex Worker’s Art Show helped drive home the need for a course like OWL.
“I believe strongly that religion needs to have something to say about sexuality,” Sequeira said. “The media tends to portray it as though there’s just one religious opinion,” Sequeira said, when, in fact, “there is a diversity of opinion.”
Kerr believes that too often, “the ‘official’ religious voice is to be reactive and negative, as though Christianity and Judaism have nothing positive to say about the body.”
“Religion is relational,” Kerr said. “These issues come up in the context of religion.”
While the course contains a spiritual element, the chaplains stress that it is open to people of all worldviews.
“This isn’t a preaching opportunity,” Kerr said. “This isn’t a doctrine teaching opportunity.” The information about sex, he said, is “methodologically neutral.”
The course, designed for about twelve people, aims to create a safe “covenant community” where, in Kerr’s words, participants can “ask any questions they want about sexuality and be treated and listened to with respect.” The group taking the course is supposed to be “utterly non-porous,” and any notes taken by the chaplains during it are later destroyed.
“There aren’t many places where you can have that discussion,” Sequeira said. “We want to offer it in a context to help people shape their values. We want to have a place to talk, not just about sex and STDs, which are important issues, but also about how to make these sorts of decisions, and to decide how we will live in the world.”
According to Sequeira, the course takes a broader view of sexuality than many more conservative abstinence-only sex education programs. “You hope that loving sexual relationships exist within marriage,” Sequeira said, “but we acknowledge that they can also exist outside.”
The course also takes a positive view of healthy lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender relationships. Sequeira says the program portrays “LGBTQ relationships as healthy and good” and “part of diversity” and that it takes a “broad and inclusive view of gender and transgender” issues.
Kerr hopes the course will help participants “to be more secure with intimacy, to express love, to think about whether to have children, and to be more secure in their orientations,” quoting Eric Gill’s statement that humans are “matter and spirit: both real and both good.”
Sequeira concurs. “We hope that people will reflect deeply about their relationship to their bodies, to themselves, and to their sexuality, and this will help them live more fully.”
Students interested in taking part in the course can contact Gini Campbell at gcampbell@mywpc.org, John Maxwell Kerr at jkerr@brutonparish.org, or Margaret Sequeira at dlfd@wuu.org.