Faith and Sexuality in High School Today

On Monday, I gave a talk to an assembly/conference of a couple hundred high school students from Catholic schools in San Francisco, with my assigned topic being “sexuality and spirituality today.” With all the caveats about the potential minefields assumed, it was also an exciting opportunity to try to reach the level of the real with them (and to try to consider what that might even mean). Despite coming from Catholic high schools, one cannot of course assume any common Catholic knowledge or identity, whether Christian or otherwise, among these students, which frames the pedagogical task most challengingly from the start. I focused my talk on three points for their personal consideration about faith and sexuality, which were my attempts to render a Catholic approach in ’nonreligious’ language: [1] Know your culture; [2] Know your power; [3] Know your community. Under the first, I discussed recent scholarship on high school and college ’hookup culture’ as it might pertain to them, and the challenges it poses. Under the second, I discussed discernment about acting on one’s own ’authority,’ which in Christian terms is a participation in God’s ’authority’, God’s power, understood not as commands but as freedom for love. And under the third, I encouraged them to consider their practices as caught up in the practices and values of their own ’beloved communities’, from which they can get good formation – or malformation. After an elocutionarily chaste 25 minutes of talking on my part, what followed was 45 minutes of good conversation with them about the above and more. As privileged as I left feeling to have this time with them, I am left with two doubts about my thinking: First, several students, including women, indicated that they thought the ’hookup culture’ did represent some progress, however ambiguous, for young women’s freedom, and that that needed more attention. I think that this response cannot simply be categorized as immature or false consciousness. Second, despite my attempt to try to start and stay as much as possible in real questions and discernments, I had the impression that we were still not touching down enough in the nitty-gritty of their reality, that my own thinking in particular, and maybe even ’the Church’s’ thinking in general, has much further to go to inhabit these questions at the level of practice–whatever that level is. I am thinking about what seriousness and courage in this realm demands. And above all I am grateful to those who teach in Catholic elementary and secondary schools, who are the vessels of the everyday miraculous in the lives of students for whom Catholic schools are among the greatest hopes in their lives. Tom Beaudoin Santa Clara, California