A Sound of Sheer Silence

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;  a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away;  a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3:1-9. I know I said that this series was going to be done with five posts, but another dimension to this discussion occurred to me over the last few days that I felt was worth adding.  It is spawned from two things.  The first is the...

Previous Posts in the Series: Part I Part II Part III Part IV I said in the beginning that I wanted to hit four different perspectives on what was at stake with LGBT issues in the Christian Church.  But it occurred to me that there was a critical fifth issue at stake that I was ignoring in my scheme.  To explain how I see that issue, it is necessary to take a dive into the Scriptures.  In particular, to take a look is one of the richest stories in the Bible, the 10th Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles . Acts 10, and basically the rest of Acts (and a large chunk of Paul's writings) is about the question of whether or not non-Jews had any place in proto-Christianity.  And Acts 10 begins by presenting us with a good test case--Cornelius the Centurion.  Cornelius was, essentially, what today we would call a "Jewish fanboy"--someone who admired the religion of the people among whom he was serving, and tried to follow their practices as far as he was able...

I moved to Columbus, Ohio in 2011 to take a one-year position as a law clerk for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals.  The Court of Appeals is the level below the Supreme Court, and so we would hear appeals from every sort of case that makes its way through the federal trial courts.  We would also review what are called petitions for habeas corpus--supplementary appeals of criminal convictions (usually either life sentences or capital sentences) that occurred in state court.  When I tell people about the cases we saw during my time associated with the court, many people assume that these criminal cases were the most interesting and engaging.  But they were not, at least I didn't think so.  More than anything else, those habeas cases were frustrating. The source of this frustration came in large part from a law called, and I am not making this up, "The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," commonly called "AEDPA."  AEDPA was pa...

Phyllis Tickle (who passed away in September--God rest her soul) wrote a book called The Great Emergence   about the future of Protestantism.  I have problems with significant parts of her thesis in that book, but she does a good job of framing the basic Protestant project.  In its most elementary form, the Protestant Reformation was a challenge to the authority of the Papacy, and by extension the ordained priesthood, to define and articulate the Christian faith and the structure of the Christian church.  We don't need these institutional mediators, said the Protestant Reformers, because we can figure out what the Christian faith is about and how to organize the church by consulting directly with the Bible.  Said another way, the Protestant Reformation replaced a person (or people) who serves as a clearly defined leader and spokesperson (and is thus exclusive and controlled) with a book which is in principle accessible to everyone. Implicit within this move is...

People who grow up in the United States, such as myself, have a very difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of an established church.  Every November, we get together to eat turkey ostensibly in remembrance of folks who fled England to get away from the grasp of the established church.  People who agree on nothing about the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution agree that it means that the government cannot establish a church as the official church of the country.  The basic story we get is that an established church is bad because it puts the power of the state behind efforts of that particular church to enforce orthodoxy, leading to religious wars and conflict.  In addition, an established church is bad for that church, because the church will be "captured" and subject to the agenda of the state, compromising its freedom and witness.  And, certainly, there is support for both of those theses in the history of the established Chur...

I had a conversation the other day that really made me think.  A friend of mine and I were talking about politics in general, and we some how got onto the topic of LGBT rights.  In a very casual way, she asked me "so, why exactly do religious conservatives have a problem with gay rights?"  After probing around a little bit, it dawned on me that many folks who engage with religious issues on the internet assume that everyone understands (at least on some level) the theological stakes, but that assumption is often very wrong.  Many people have no idea what the arguments for and against LGBT rights are, other than that lots of religious people are again' em, as they say. In that light, I figured it was worth while to try to set out some of the big questions that I see on this issue.  In doing so, I make no claims to breaking any new ground or advancing innovative ideas or solutions.  Instead, I am going to try to present the questions as honestly as possible...