A Sound of Sheer Silence

We have discussed this before: Some people actually mean "right body" when they say "orthodox". — Broderick Greer (@BroderickGreer) April 27, 2017 Yesterday in the Twitterverse, or at least in the portion of the Twitterverse I interact with, there was a long discussion of an article by Rev. Tish Harrison Warren , a priest of the Anglican Church of North America (which is relevant to this discussion, but more on that later).  The claim of the article is that the Christian blogosphere (which, I suppose I should disclose in case it wasn't obvious, includes me, I guess) is run a muck because all sorts of people are writing things without being subject to proper authority.  And the person offered as the poster-child for this problem was Jen Hatmaker .  I will confess to not being familiar with her work prior to yesterday, but evidently Hatmaker recently come out in support of LGBT relationships in a Christian context , provoking the now-predictable backlash . ...

Previous Posts in the Series Introduction Introductory Chapter Chapters 1 and 2 Chapters 3 and 4   (Especially good!) Interlude Chapter 5 and 6 Chapter 7 Chapters 8 and 9 Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan's Good Christian Sex  is great.  I've given it to a couple of people who have told me they have benefited greatly from it.  It is the book I would give to a teenager or young adult trying to work their way through the process of integrating sexuality with spirituality and wholeness. Rather than recap the book again, I figured it might be useful as a post-script to think about "where to go from here"?  McCleneghan sketches out a vision of an authentic progressive Christian sexual ethic, but it is no criticism of the book to say that there are places that would benefit from further reflection and development, as no one book can be a comprehensive account of something like sexuality.  Here are a couple of places that I think she or others might jump off ...

It is something that I have thought for a long time, but it has become absolutely, unquestionably clear.  This insight is essential to understanding almost everything that is going on in modern Christianity, and I think it will be the defining issue for Christianity for the next generation, at least.  You cannot understand where we are or where we are going if you don't grasp this.  It is so important that it deserves to be written separately, and it should be written on the top of every paper and every essay discussing any of these topics: The issue of homosexuality (or whatever terminology you want to use) in Christianity is not ultimately about homosexuality; it is about gender. For the entirety of its history, with some limited exceptions, Christianity has been predicated on an, often unspoken but nevertheless pervasive, view that men and women are fundamentally different, and that this difference plays out invariably to the benefit of men at the expense of women....

I have , on a couple of occasions , told war stories about sex ed in a Catholic high school in the South in the middle 90s.  What is interesting to me about that program, looking back with the benefit of adulthood and hindsight, is the way in which it balanced (or, really, attempted to balance) two entirely different sets of objectives.  On the one hand, you had what you might call the "Catholic objectives"--don't have pre-marital sex, don't use birth control, abortion is the worst thing ever, maybe if we don't talk about gay people they will just go away, etc.  But, at the same time, it was also trying to communicate what you might call "ambitious middle class objectives," which focused on the message "if you have to raise a child before you are financially secure/fully educated, your life will be over." To that end, the big senior year religion project was that you partnered up with a classmate (of the opposite gender, natch) and had to tak...