On Alexander Pruss’s One Body

Abstract

This essay considers one key aspect of Alexander Pruss’s One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), namely, his judgment that many, perhaps most, of the fleshly intimacies possible among human persons ought be evaluated and judged licit or illicit by their relation to the act whereby husband and wife become “one flesh.” This account of fleshly intimacies is too restrictive, indeed absurdly so, and particularly if considered according to natural lights alone and in abstraction from Christian revelation and doctrine, which is what Pruss claims to do in the book.