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Meeting Donna Freitas: AReviewof Sex and the Soul and an Interview Heidi Harris Review Donna Freitas. Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 299 pp. Hardcover, $24.95; ISBN: 978-0-19-531165-5
Returning from spring break in 2005, Dr. Donna Freitas, assistant professor of religion at St. Michael's College, a small Roman Catholic school near Burlington, Vermont, witnessed an epiphany in her "Dating and Friendship" course. One by one, her students admitted to themselves and to each other their profound disappointment in the sexual culture of their school-the "hook-up culture." They were tired of juggling reputation and desirability. They noticed that it was practically impossible to find a respectful and long-term relationship and equally impossible to find any romance at all. And finally, they wanted to figure out how so much could be going on at frat parties that flew in the face of what they supposedly believed. After discussing the larger issue, Freitas's students determined that there was an essential dialogue missing from their everyday campus lives. Conversations about sex were pervasive within peer groups, and campus priests and professors spoke often about spirituality, but Freitas discovered that her students wanted to "have conversations about sex in relation to the soul" (12; emphasis hers).
Thus began Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses. Freitas took her students' questions and shaped them first into a cross-country study and, second, into a critically acclaimed book. Sex and the Soul explores the pressures experienced by students across varied college demographic situations. Her research includes seven campuses, each classified within her system as either Catholic, Evangelical, private secular, or public. However, although she makes these technical distinctions throughout the book, Freitas concludes that there is little difference between the spirituality of sex in Catholic, private, and public schools, eventually lumping them into a more general "secular" label. The outliers in her "spiritual" category are the Evangelical colleges in which the "hook-up" culture was practically non-existent and where students worked within the framework of their own complex "purity" culture.
Sex and the Soul quotes extensively from the more than 2,500 student interviews Freitas conducted as well as daily journals kept by...