Sexuality Education Committee

SEC is open to new members for the 2008 spring semester. SEC coordinates, administers, evaluates and develops programming in keeping with the purpose of SEC to "administer an ecumenical and interfaith program in human sexuality." Membership on the SEC entails at least monthly meetings and support of the programs.

SEC is a registered student organization funded and affiliated with the following campus ministries: KU Hillell Foundation (Jewish), Lutheran Campus Ministry (ELCA), University Nazarene Church, and Ecumenical Christian Ministries (Presbyterian USA, United Church of Christ, Brethren and Quaker), and First Presbyterian College Ministry.

Coordinators: Reanna Putnam (reannap@ku.edu) and Lauren Tullis (It--88@ku.edu).

ECM Supports Professor Dennis Dailey

Why are Campus Ministries Co-sponsoring Programs of the Sexuality Education Committee?

Dr. James Nelson, Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary and United Church of Christ minister, summarizes the ministries' reasons for sponsorship:

"While sexuality may well include our desires for experiencing and sharing genital sexuality, it is far more than this. More fundamentally and inclusively, it is who we are as bodyselves - selves who experience the ambiguities of both "having" and "being" bodies. Sexuality embraces our ways of being in the world as persons embodied with biological femaleness and maleness and with internalized understanding of what these genders mean. Sexuality includes our erotic orientations - our attractions, to the other sex, the same sex, or to both. Sexuality includes the range of feelings, interpretations, and behaviors through which we express our capabilities for sensuous relationships with ourselves, with others and this world. While sexuality is always rooted in our body realities, it is much larger than these, always involving our minds, our feelings, our wills, our memories, and indeed our self-understanding and powers as embodied persons.

Theologically, we believe that human sexuality, while including God's gifts of the procreative capacity, is most fundamentally the divine invitation to find our destinies not in loneliness but in deep connection. To the degree that it is free from the distortions of unjust and abusive power relations, we experience our sexuality as the basic eros of our humanness that urges, invites, and lures us out of our loneliness into intimate communication and communication with God and the world. It is instructive to remember that the word "sexuality" itself comes from the Latin sexus, probably akin to Latin secare, meaning to cut or divide - suggesting incompleteness seeking wholeness and connection that reaches through and beyond our differences and divisions. Sexuality, in suite, is the physiological and emotional grounding of our capacities to love."

From the Introduction of "Sexuality and the Sacred," edited by James Nelson and Sandra J. Longfellow.