It was a competitive nine-year-olds’ baseball game. Grandson’s team was in the process of experiencing their first loss of what was so far an eight-game season. Watching a grandson thrive as a truly self-motivated, avid – and grampa would add gifted – baseball player who
To say that the country is polarized is hardly news — especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ equality. It’s also not news that arguments with those who still want to deny full equality to LGBTQ+ people rarely hinge on facts. The president has even made
The Bible is just an old, old book sitting on a bookshelf. Well, really, it’s a collection of old books from different times and places that’s more an anthology of writings originally written in different languages. Sometimes people do read it, but most often they
What is a eunuch by birth? A curious, enigmatic, debated, and often dismissed, verse is found in the 19th chapter of the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew. Some scholars for the past 40 years or so have argued that it includes a reference to men
A tale of the relationship of two women, Ruth and Naomi, is tucked within those books in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “Old Testament”) that are called historical because they portray a legendary history of a people from its beginnings as a tribe to its
For those of us who are old enough and were somewhat “woke” back then, the COVID-19 pandemic invokes hidden emotions that remind one of the painful early years of the AIDS crisis. There are differences, certainly, because this pandemic is directly affecting a broader demographic,
Challenging Us To Admit How Little We Know Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, by award-winning scholar and teacher Melissa M. Wilcox, would make an excellent textbook in an “introductory” course in which I’d like to enroll. And it was
According to what we’re told in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “Old Testament”), Jonathan, a king’s son, loved a man who would become a more famous king, David — and David in turn loved Jonathan. No matter the actual history behind the story, what we’re
Jesus and homosexuality: A lens It’s common for more progressive Christians to defend LGBTQ+ people by saying that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. But is that true, if we’re referring to the versions of Jesus that have made it down to us in the collections
People bring their prejudices with them when they come to the Bible. It’s why the most popular of the choices of how to interpret those passages used to clobber LGBTQ+ people is the one that is historically less probable but supports a dominant cultural prejudice.