Sublime

Undercurrent here is the judgment that the one denying self in favor of another is in the spiritually superior position.

At the 2018 National Rural Assembly, legendary activist Ruby Sales said, “It is in community and in relationship with others that we locate a self that we can never find being isolated. It is in community and in relationship with each other that we come to know the consciousness and the spirit of god that is in each of us.”

inchoate

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

When LGBTQ evangelicals, their families, and allies start pressing for dignity and even full inclusion, they begin their arguments from within an evangelical theological framework. Eventually they tend to discover that evangelical ways of reading Scripture and, more broadly, of observing reality and discerning truth, may themselves be the problem.

As I began, the words of the abolitionist William Wilberforce ran through my mind: “You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.”[1] In 1789, filled with passion over the evil of slavery and an unflinching commitment to see it end, he had risen in the British Parliament and described in unwavering graphic detai