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Posts from the ‘Gender/Sexuality’ Category

Sep 28

6 Comments

Selling Sex

So, Hugh Hefner is dead. I don’t expect to see the breathless eulogizing that often accompanies the deaths of other famous people—I suppose we still retain just enough prudery (or at least good taste) to feel at least slightly awkward about praising the man who brought the world Playboy magazine. At least some of us might. I don’t know. More likely is a kind of chuckle, chuckle, wink, nudge frat boy mentality that thinks, “Not bad, the guy entered his tenth decade still surrounded by his young airbrushed bunnies, still living the dream of unrestrained lust and easy sex, still selling human bodies for greedy profit, still building and maintaining his palatial empire of desire right to the end. Atta boy, Hugh!” Or something like that.  Read more

Jun 28

3 Comments

I Didn’t Choose This

“If there was one thing that you would say to the church or if there was one thing that you would want Christians to know about your experience as a gay man, what would it be?” This was the question that I recently put to a friend on a warm summer evening near the end of a wide-ranging conversation that had covered everything from his experience of coming out to the controversies around Pride celebrations in our community to the sexualization of identity more broadly to his experience growing up in a conservative evangelical church. His answer surprised me a little, both for its content and for its brevity. He needed little time to think before saying, simply, “I didn’t choose this.” I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t say much more. I had asked for one thing and one thing was what I got.  Read more

Oct 24

3 Comments

An Ordinary Sunday

Midway through last week, someone encouraged me to periodically attempt something like modern “retellings” of Jesus’ parables during my sermons. In other words, rather than drily “explaining” the stories Jesus told, just try to tell the story in a new way. So, I gave it a shot yesterday. These stories are based on Luke 18:9-14, the famous parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. What follows is, it should be noted, a work of fiction, even if it is obviously informed by various stories and experiences I’ve encountered along the way. Read more

Jul 21

10 Comments

Course Correction

There are times, even amidst the gloriously lazy days of bright sunny mid-summer, when it’s difficult not to despair of being human. I was sitting with friends at various points yesterday, enjoying casual conversation, catching up on the news, on current events, on stuff going on in people’s lives… At least three different times we came to a point in the conversation where someone said something like, “Ok, this is getting depressing. We need to find something else to talk about.” Read more

Jul 11

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Sky

I spent thirteen or so hours this past week driving under the summer prairie sky. Saskatoon was the location of our Mennonite national church’s biennial gathering which I combined with a visit with my brother and his family. It’s a long drive and very flat. It’s the kind of drive that is easy to dread, particularly in winter months when the roads are bad and the landscape is bleak. It’s a drive I’ve done often enough but it’s not one that I’ve ever particularly relished. This time, however, the sky almost literally took my breath away. Golden yellow canola beside wavy green barley fields stretched out under this vast canopy of pillowy cloud and brilliant blue. Or, when the weather turned, spectacular scenes of dark, brooding masses of cloud. The sky seemed alive. Even when it looked threatening and portended fierce rain, it was a kind of strange comfort. It was the kind of sky that puts you in your place. There was a vast unchangeableness about it. It seemed the kind of sky that nothing could go wrong under. Read more

Jul 15

31 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

I’ve tried to sit down and write something substantive here a few times over the past week and a half or so, but for whatever reason(s), the words haven’t come. Maybe it’s just because the last few weeks have been unusually full. Maybe I’m out of words. Maybe my spirit (and the Internet) is in need of a prolonged period of digital silence. Maybe I just need a vacation.

At any rate, in place of a more substantive piece, here are a few unfinished thoughts on unrelated matters for a summer Wednesday morning. Read more

Jun 18

33 Comments

Wired That Way

Earlier this week, Canada’s top military man, Gen. Tom Lawson said a very, very bad thing in an interview about sexual misconduct in the Canadian military. He said that sexual harassment remains an issue in the military due to “biological wiring.” Oh dear. Read more

May 19

7 Comments

What’s Love Got to Do With It? We Couldn’t Possibly Say…

As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent a lot of time on the road this past weekend. Twenty-six hours in a car on one’s own affords plenty of time for listening to things, and when I wasn’t preparing for the concert by going through U2’s entire catalogue, I listened to a number of podcasts. One of these podcasts, in particular, stood out to me. It was an episode of q—a Canadian culture/current affairs radio program—and the topic under discussion was whether or not love should be part of the sex education curriculum in public schools. Read more

Feb 19

13 Comments

Putting Out FIRES

I’ve been reading Tim Otto’s Oriented to Faith over the past few weeks as I seek to help our church have healthy conversations about sexuality. Like many churches, ours is characterized by a wide diversity of views when it comes to how the church should live with and think/talk about homosexuality. As we have these conversations, one thing that I am convinced of is that we need to make space to hear from a plurality of Christian voices on these matters, whether it is those who would have an “affirming” view or those whose perspectives would run along more traditional lines.

Or those that don’t fit nicely in any camp. Like Tim Otto. Read more

Aug 13

3 Comments

Brain States

Religious fanaticism is, regrettably, front and center in our collective consciousness again in this the summer of bad news. Whether it is Iraq or Israel/Palestine or other places around the globe, many people are quick to point to the role that religion plays in stoking the flames of violence and hatred.

And whenever there is violence associated with religion in the news, we can expect to see articles like “The God Effect” over at Aeon Magazine.  The piece, written by Patrick McNamara, seeks to locate the religious impulse in dopamine levels in the brain. There is, according to McNamara, a fine line between “benevolent saints” and “murderous fanatics.” And dopamine, apparently, is one of the main triggers for when this line is crossed.  Read more

Mar 26

5 Comments

How Things Work in the World of (Mostly) Rich Western Christians

It seemed like every time I ventured into the wonderful world of social media today, I was greeted by a new salvo from one side or the other of World Vision’s recent yes-we-do, wait, no-we-don’t position on whether or how they will hire gay Christians to work in their organization, with all the predictable bleating and threatening and pulling of support (in response to both decisions) echoing around the corners of evangelical Christian-dom. It was all very sad and pathetic, and mostly it just made me embarrassed to be a Christian.

Read more

Feb 10

8 Comments

Sin

Our church has spent two hours over the past few Sundays wading into the potentially stormy waters of dialogue about human sexuality as part of our national church’s ongoing discernment process. Among the many interesting things that came up over the course of a very stimulating (although far too brief) conversation was the question of the boundaries of sin. “Why are we so hesitant to use ‘sin’ language?” was one question. Why indeed. It’s a good question. Read more

Jan 29

13 Comments

Time to Talk

I deleted my Twitter account today. I had been a Twitter-er or a tweet-er or whatever the right term is for just under two months during which I produced a grand total of fifty-five tweets.

I apologize to both of my followers.  Read more

Dec 28

8 Comments

2013 in Review (And a Thank You!)

So, 2013 is drawing to a close, which means it’s time to take a peek in the rearview mirror and reflect a bit on the year that has nearly passed.  In the blogging world, this means—what else?!—highlighting the most read posts on this blog over the past 365 days or so.  It’s an imperfect tool of evaluation, obviously—a cursory count of clicks and page views hardly provides an accurate assessment of meaningful or substantive engagement—but I suppose it give some sense of the themes that drew people here over the year.   Whenever I look at statistical summaries on this blog, I find myself scratching my head.  That was my most-read post?!  I don’t even like that one!  Why didn’t ____ make the list? Posts that I am convinced are the best thing the internet has seen since, well, two hours or so ago languish in obscurity while others that I dashed off in twenty minutes generate more traffic than I would ever have expected.   I suppose such is the nature of blogging. Read more

Aug 19

4 Comments

Mixed Metaphor

At our church, we’ve spent the last two weeks rummaging around in the biblical cupboard, looking at the various metaphors employed to describe God and human beings. It’s been an interesting exercise, at least for me. In both cases, the metaphors are numerous and diverse. God as rock, lion, breath, lamb, light, fire, tower, warrior, friend, and on and on it goes, the biblical writers reaching and straining, borrowing from the world of creation and human relationships to express some partial aspect of who God is and how God works in the world. Human beings as grass, dust, vapour, treasured possession, bride, the apple of God’s eye, each image contributing to the complex mix of transience, sin, glory, and beauty that is humanity. We need these metaphors, to help us learn to see what God is like, what we are like. Read more

May 30

8 Comments

Be Kind to Each Other

I listened to the story of a gay man yesterday. It was a story both tragic and tragically typical. It was a story of knowing he was “different” from his very earliest memories, of being mocked and ridiculed throughout his school years, a story of confusion, anger, and pain, a story of desperately trying to come to terms with an identity that just didn’t fit, a story of a string of unsatisfying relationships, a story of isolation and deep loneliness that persists to the present day.

It was also, of course, a story in which the church played a role. I wish I could say that it was a positive role—that the community that bears the name of the Friend of Sinners had provided a place of refuge and peace for this person… I wish I could say that. But I can’t. We all know that this isn’t how the story usually goes. We know that “rejection” and “guilt” and “judgment” and “fear” and “misunderstanding” are among the words that appear at this point in the story. Read more

Sep 17

10 Comments

God Loves Human Beings—Start with That

Just over three years ago, I threw up a post about a conversation with my son about the word “amen” and whether the “men” part of the word meant that God was only interested in men and not women. It was a rather quick post about the nature of the words we use, how our relationship to them changes over time, and what these words communicate about our views on gender. I didn’t think much of the post at the time. There are some posts on this blog that I spend a fair amount of time writing, but this was not one of them. It was an interesting conversation with my son, a few reflections of my own, and not much more.

Read more

Feb 3

58 Comments

“Masculine” Christianity?

Apparently John Piper has, in a recent address delivered at a pastors conference, added his voice to Mark Driscoll’s in advocating a more “masculine Christianity.” Driscoll, of course, created his latest storm of controversy in an interview with British radio host Justin Brierley a few weeks back, when he said, among other things, that there were no good Bible teachers in the UK, and that the reason that churches were struggling was because they were led by women. The implication was that if churches across the pond would just “man up” and start letting men lead, and stop wallowing in effeminate religion, the “results” (i.e., more churches that look like Driscoll’s ) would come. An interesting theory, to be sure—a little light on context and cultural awareness, and, well, reason, but there you go. Muscular, manly Christianity is, apparently, the cure for what ails the church. Read more

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