Old wine in a new skin? In 1986 the Office of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith issued “A Pastoral Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.” The signatory of the document was (then) Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
Now I know I am doomed. The cancellation of the show “Joan of Arcadia” is the final straw for me. After all where will I go to enrich my mind about how God infiltrates the world today? Maybe I have just been watching too much
You’ve heard the question in a number of forms: Why are gay people the way they are? I’m not talking about the complaints of critical right-wingers. They refuse to accept a rational answer, and don’t want one. I’m talking about the generalizations we make about
While listening to music recently, my mp3 player on “shuffle” and me in a state of relaxation, the 1956 version of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” began to play. As the sounds of piano and trumpet filled the air, I was transported by my imagination to
There is nothing in Scripture that prohibits full acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, and ordaining their unions as sacraments in the Church. Since the Bible is used to justify homophobia, I want to deal with this issue from a biblical perspective, fully recognizing, as with the
We could spend a lifetime debating the various interpretations of scripture and sadly, many of us do! Imagine what we look like to non-believers as they watch us argue and fight, often very publicly, over what we believe the Bible has to say – not
In the 6th century AD, over 500 years after the death of Christ, Emperor Constantine, was the first Christian emperor of Rome. Constantine was having trouble with the different religious factions in his kingdom. There was much squabbling and infighting over various points of Christian
I grew up in a small town in South Carolina. My experience with Christianity was in the same Southern Baptist church my mother attended until she got married. Even in college, I still believed that the Bible was the “literal Word of God written by
My journey to understanding the Bible and how it applies to my life has been a long one. As a child, my parents had me baptized in the Methodist faith and we attended church until I was 9. Often, my parents would drop me off
One of the greatest issues facing individuals coming out of an experience with the Worldwide Church of God and its related organizations is what many pastoral counselors call “Bible abuse.” This is an issue not limited to the Worldwide Church of God experience which I