A Sound of Sheer Silence

On Sunday, I had a visit with a man that I got to know during my time with the Dominicans.  He was enormously supportive of me during that time; in fact, he was the most supportive member of the Dominicans, all told.  I will always be very grateful to him for his kindness and support in my early 20s.  He was a couple of years ahead of me in formation, but he entered the Order older (after a complex and convoluted process), so he is a good 15 or so years older than I am.  He is, at his heart, a good man who cares deeply for the people around him.  He is also someone who takes great joy in being a priest, and he truly puts his whole self into that role. And yet, every time I see him, I come away very sad, and this time was no exception.  While he loves being a priest, he has not found the support among his fellow Dominicans that he hoped for, a fact that he admitted to me on Sunday.  This is to some degree a function of the fact that (as he also acknowle...

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those. I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  ...