You Are Hereby Granted Permission to Evolve on Same Sex Marriage

May 14, 2012 By Tony Jones 87 Comments

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

-Michel Foucault
The Archaeology of Knoweldge

The greatest thinkers change, their thinking evolves. Augustine changed as his theological career progressed — the Augustine of the Confessions is not the same as Bishop Augustine. Some think he changed for the better, I happen to think he changed for the worse.

One could argue that Paul changed, if you read his letters chronologically.

People parse the “early Wittgenstein” and the “late Wittgenstein,” because the greatest philosopher of language of the 20th century changed his mind. The same could be said of any number of great thinkers between Augustine and Wittgenstein.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: christianity in america, glbt, same sex marriage Tagged With: 87 Comments

Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School Lives Up to Its Name

May 12, 2012 By Tony Jones 14 Comments

Freshman Paige Sultzbach plays second base for Mesa Prep. A Catholic School won't play against her because she's a girl.

Catholicism in America seems to continue is quest for irrelevance via misogyny. This from CNN:

Baseball final forfeited because of girl at second base

The Arizona Charter Athletic Association state championship baseball game wasn’t played Thursday night because Mesa Prep’s second baseman is a girl.

Paige Sultzbach, a freshman, is playing baseball because her high school doesn’t offer girls softball. But the school Mesa Prep was to face in the final, Our Lady of Sorrows Academy, said its boys would not compete against a team with a girl and forfeited the game – and the state title – to Mesa Prep.

“As a Catholic school, we promote the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education,” Our Lady of Sorrows said in a statement, according to CNN affiliate KTVK.

“It takes tremendous moral courage to stand by what it is you believe, and they are doing what they think is right,” Mesa Prep Headmaster Robert Wagner told KTVK.

But Sultzbach’s mother, Pamela Sultzbach, said her daughter and the Mesa Prep team were being done a disservice.

“This is not a contact sport. It shouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t that they were afraid they were going to hurt or injure her, it’s that (they believe) that a girl’s place is not on a field,” Pamela Sultzbach told the Arizona Republic.

“I respect their views, but it’s a bit out of the 18th century,” Amy Arnold, Mesa Prep’s athletic director, told the Republic.

Mesa Prep and Our Lady of Sorrows played twice during the regular season, but Sultzbach sat out, as they were away games for her team.

“It was on their field, and I felt the need to respect their rules,” she told KTVK.

The final would have been on a neutral field, and Sultzbach wanted to play.

Now, despite being hailed as state champions, Mesa Prep will feel like they’ve missed something, Pamela Sultzbach said.

“This team has worked so hard,” she said. “They’re undefeated. They had one game left. At our school, we’re taught that when you start something, you complete it, and they weren’t done.”

via Baseball final forfeited because of girl at second base – This Just In – CNN.com Blogs.

Filed Under: christianity in america 14 Comments

A Liberal, Gay Cleric Defends Campus Crusade

May 11, 2012 By Tony Jones 4 Comments

Peter Gomes (1942-2011)

It seems that the late Peter Gomes stared down the administration at Harvard University when they tried to oust an evangelical campus group. Gomes won.

Now, Vanderbilt is attempting to do something similar to Cru (the new name for Campus Crusade), and Cru’s defenders are invoking Gomes’s memory in their defense.

From Bob Smietana at the Tennessean:

When Vanderbilt wanted its freshmen students to learn about ethics, the school turned to the late Rev. Peter Gomes to teach them. Gomes’ book, The Good Life, was required reading for the Vanderbilt class of 2015.

Now some critics of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy hope the school will turn to Gomes, a Harvard professor who died last year, once again.

In 2003, a Christian group at Harvard called the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship ran afoul of that school’s nondiscrimination policy because it required its leaders to hold specific beliefs.

Harvard’s administration told the group to change its ways or leave campus. But Gomes, a professor and minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, defended the student group, saying the university was discriminating against it.

“How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” he wrote in a 2003 letter to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.

Read the rest: Foes of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy point to Harvard | The Tennessean | tennessean.com.

Filed Under: christianity in america Tagged With: 4 Comments

Catholic Bishops Insist on Waging a Culture War

May 11, 2012 By Tony Jones 13 Comments

It seems that every week, Catholic bishops in the U.S. are speaking out against something. Their target now: the Girl Scouts. That’s right, it seems that the organizations whose mission statement reads, “Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place,” is a threat to Catholics. From the AP:

NEW YORK (AP) — Long a lightning rod for conservative criticism, the Girl Scouts of the USA are now facing their highest-level challenge yet: An official inquiry by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

At issue are concerns about program materials that some Catholics find offensive, as well as assertions that the Scouts associate with other groups espousing stances that conflict with church teaching. The Scouts, who have numerous parish-sponsored troops, deny many of the claims and defend their alliances.

The inquiry coincides with the Scouts’ 100th anniversary celebrations and follows a chain of other controversies.

Why? Because there are rumors that the Girl Scouts partner with Planned Parenthood. They don’t, says spokesperson Gladys Padro-Soler. She adds, ”It’s been hard to get the message out there as to what is true when distortions get repeated over and over.”

Already this year, Catholic bishops have been bashing gays, claiming religious persecution, Sandra Fluke, and now attacking the Girl Scouts. Seems an odd strategy in the face of ongoing pedophilia problems.

In fact, it seems that humility and a few years decades of quiet service to humanity might be a better strategy.

Filed Under: christianity in america Tagged With: , 13 Comments

Proof: Women Are Better Leaders than Men

May 10, 2012 By Tony Jones 9 Comments

In the Harvard Business Review, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman release the results of their study on men, women, and leadership.

In the confirmation category is our first finding: The majority of leaders (64%) are still men. And the higher the level, the more men there are: In this group, 78% of top managers were men, 67% at the next level down (that is, senior executives reporting directly to the top managers), 60% at the manager level below that.

Similarly, most stereotypes would have us believe that female leaders excel at “nurturing” competencies such as developing others and building relationships, and many might put exhibiting integrity and engaging in self-development in that category as well. And in all four cases our data concurred — women did score higher than men.

But the women’s advantages were not at all confined to traditionally women’s strengths. In fact at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts — and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows:

Read the rest: Are Women Better Leaders than Men? – Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman – Harvard Business Review.

I realize there’s a glass ceiling in business because of the “old boys’ club.” But we should be able to quickly counteract this trend in the church. Why, then, does the gender make-up of the church so heavily favor men in leadership?!?

HT: Michael Toy

Filed Under: christianity in america Tagged With: 9 Comments

Obama Gets Off the Pot on Gay Marriage

May 9, 2012 By Tony Jones 39 Comments


After years of hedging on gay marriage — which many of us who supported him thought was a political ploy — President Barack Obama today declared his support of gay marriage. What had been a day of mourning for many GLBTs and allies in the wake of the Amendment 1 loss in North Carolina, has turned to a day of victory.

For the first time ever, a sitting president has had the courage to voice support for marriage equality. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. From the AP article:

In the interview, Obama said, “I have hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient.” He added, “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people the word ‘marriage’ was something that invokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs and so forth.”

Now, he said, “it is important for me personally to go ahead and affirm that same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Obama said first lady Michelle Obama also was involved in his decision and joins him in supporting gay marriage.

“In the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people,” he said.

Well, that last quote is startlingly Christian.

Many will write this off as yet another political ploy — an attempt to re-ignite young voters next November. It may do that, or it may backfire — this may turn out to be Obama’s Jimmy Carter moment.

Regardless of the politics of it, the significance will long-lasting and far-flung, for it’s difficult to imagine anything that would do more to normalize homosexuality in our culture than this.

Kudos, Mr. President. Thanks for doing something so deeply Christian.

Filed Under: christianity in america, glbt, politics, same sex marriage Tagged With: , 39 Comments

Goodbye, Evangelicalism

May 9, 2012 By Tony Jones 18 Comments

Rachel Held Evans sees the passage of Amendment 1 in North Carolina yesterday as another nail in the coffin of the evangelical church and its relevance to millennials.

When I speak at Christian colleges, I often take time to chat with students in the cafeteria.  When I ask them what issues are most important to them, they consistently report that they are frustrated by how the Church has treated their gay and lesbian friends.  Some of these students would say they most identify with what groups like the Gay Christian Network term “Side A” (they believe homosexual relationships have the same value as heterosexual relations in the sight of God). Others better identify with “Side B” (they believe only male/female relationship in marriage is God’s intent for sexuality). But every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.

Most have close gay and lesbian friends.

Most feel that the Church’s response to homosexuality is partly responsible for high rates of depression and suicide among their gay and lesbian friends, particularly those who are gay and Christian.

Most are highly suspicious of “ex-gay” ministries that encourage men and women with same-sex attractions to marry members of the opposite sex in spite of their feelings.

Most feel that the church is complicit, at least at some level, in anti-gay bullying.

And most…I daresay all…have expressed to me passionate opposition to legislative action against gays and lesbians.

READ THE REST: Rachel Held Evans | How to win a culture war and lose a generation.

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Kudos to Andy Stanley

May 9, 2012 By Tony Jones 9 Comments

Andy Stanley is getting shat upon for showing compassion to the messiness of family life.

Andy Stanley and I don’t have a whole lot in common, theologically speaking. But I met him once, and he was humble and charitable. This week, he became Al Mohler’s most recent whipping boy — and if that isn’t an example of internecine cannibalism, I don’t know what is.

Andy Marin has an insightful post on the kerfuffle at Out of Ur:

Recently North Point Community Church’s senior pastor Andy Stanley preached a sermon about the theological tension that is needed to live in the Way of the Christian faith. (Listen at North Point’s website. The controversial section begins about 24 minutes in.) Well known conservative commentator and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Al Mohler, took offense to Stanley’s non-mention of the sin of homosexuality in the sermon. Stanley illustrated a story of a wife, husband and daughter in his church—where the husband cheated with another man who eventually became his partner—and the journey for each of the participants. The reality of this family’s new tension-filled dynamic illustrated for Stanley the tension between grace and truth in the Christian faith.

Stanley spent the majority of the sermon fleshing out his understanding of this tension by highlighting Jesus’ changing response to sin through his words and deeds in the Gospel stories. Should sin be forgiven, or should a person be held accountable? Should we act harshly or be kind? Point a finger or ignore? As Stanley stated:

“We’re all tempted to want to resolve that tension. But if you resolve it, you give up something important. It’s what drove people crazy about Jesus. But he was comfortable with it. He was able to minister through it. And we dare not walk away from it.”

It should not be a surprise that Mohler took a hardline stand against Stanley’s nuanced message of tension.

Read the rest of Marin’s analysis: Out of Ur: Andy Stanley, Al Mohler, and Homosexuality.

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How White Is the Emerging Church?

May 8, 2012 By Tony Jones 40 Comments

Pretty white, as it turns out. I asked Todd Ferguson of Baylor University to run crosstabs on the data that I collected in 2005. During my dissertation research, I collected 2,020 surveys from eight ECM congregations. You can read about my research and see some of the data in my book, The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement.

Since then, I’ve let several researchers have my data for their own work. Todd is among them, and I asked him to correct a glaring oversight in my book — I neglected to offer this snapshot of the racial profile of the eight congregations I surveyed.

93% of emergents are white, according to my research. This is not generalizable across the movement — my research methods were not set up in that way. This is, as I said, a snapshot of eight congregations on a single Sunday in 2005. The most diverse church in the study was Cedar Ridge Community Church, at which Brian McLaren was the pastor at the time. Here’s a graphic:

The racial make-up of the emerging church movement.

Years ago, Soon-Chang Rah asked in Sojourners Magazine whether the emerging church movement is “for whites only.” I responded by asking whether Sojourners is for straight only, because it seems to me that we face the same problem: we’d like to be broader than we are, but that’s as tough as getting white and black students to sit next to each other in a public high school cafeteria.

In other words, it’s easy to criticize our movement or Sojo or North Park University (where Rah teaches) or the Evangelical Covenant Church (the denomination with which North Park is affiliated) for being too white. Yes, we’re all too white. The real question is, How do we diversify a movement that is purposefully non-evangelistic?

That is, the ECM is about a particular people trying to solve particular problem. If our solution isn’t interesting to everyone, is that a weakness that we should correct?

Filed Under: christianity in america, emergent church 40 Comments

Don’t Blame the Bible for Your Bad Views on Homosexuality

May 4, 2012 By Tony Jones 166 Comments

Matthew Vines is an undergrad at Harvard. He’s also gay, and he’s a Christian. He’s taking some time off of school right now to fight marriage amendments, like the one in my state, Minnesota.

He gave a talk in Wichita a couple weeks ago — you can see it above. He’s articulate, smart, and the video is worth 67 minutes of your time. Here’s what Leonard Pitts said about the video in the Miami Herald:

Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

Find Matthew here:
– Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/VinesMatthew
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.vines
– Tumblr: http://matthewvines.tumblr.com
– YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/VinesMatthew

Filed Under: christianity in america, glbt Tagged With: 166 Comments
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