Links to a lost interlocutor: Creative tension, sexual intelligence, and young adult male Roman Catholics

Many 18-22 year-old Roman Catholic young men consider themselves relegated to the back of the line when it comes to the church hearing, appreciating, and incorporating their sexual ways of understanding contemporary human experience within psycho-social, cultural, and sociological contexts of everyday living. These young men sense a palpable contradictory request: being encouraged to develop physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, culturally, imaginatively, spiritually, morally, and religiously, but not encouraged to allow these areas of growth to meaningfully co-exist within the fullness of their sexual ways of being in the world. Struggling in the daily tension between their ongoing sexual intelligence and maturity and the ways in which the church views and attends to them as sexual beings is a visible concern. The study explores this contention, in order for young men and us to better tackle and steer this emergent dissonance with critical insight, purpose, and promise for the benefit of all. The work is a humanistic study set within the framework of qualitative research, specifically geared to the academic community and the young adult male population. The research is qualitative, not in the narrow sense of fieldwork techniques and interviewing, but rather in the larger scope of investigative research. Among numerous types employed, the primary methodology is philosophical hermeneutics. The study explores the possibility of an expanded meaning and richer understanding of what is considered sexual intelligence. The overall aim is to explore a developmental journey of deep centering toward one’s body, community of men and women, cosmos, and God in sustaining a more critical and mature sexual intelligence for Roman Catholic young men today through cognitive and human modeling based frameworks