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{"id":10869,"date":"2017-08-14T11:45:38","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T15:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10869"},"modified":"2017-08-14T11:45:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T15:45:38","slug":"new-addition-small-bookshelf-good-gay-christian-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2017\/08\/new-addition-small-bookshelf-good-gay-christian-books.html","title":{"rendered":"A New Addition to the Very Small Bookshelf of Good Gay Christian Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Hey! I am excited to announce that Gregory Coles\u2019s book is coming out. Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity<\/a> is a short book, basically a memoir. I think I blurbed it as \u201craw and endearing\u201d or something like that. It\u2019s very honest about the pain he went through coming out within the evangelical world and trying to figure out what a future of love rather than despairing isolation might look like. It\u2019s a painful read but can provide a lot of companionship for people who have really struggled to experience God\u2019s love for them. (In the pre-publication version I read, the beginning doesn\u2019t really hint that things do get better, but in fact Coles does start to discern possibilities for love within his church, and he begins to experience God\u2019s tender love for him.)<\/p>\n

My one actual criticism isn\u2019t even a criticism of the book itself but of the evangelical world, to the extent that I know it. This book is written the way a lot of evangelical work on sexuality is written: as if Christian history stops at the end of Acts, then skips forward to about 1994 with nothing in between. Without a feeling for the historical dimension of Christianity and the weird diversity of Christian societies and saints, people struggling with contemporary Christian cultures\u2019 failures are much more isolated.<\/p>\n

And in this temporal isolation it\u2019s much harder to get past our own culture\u2019s blind spots w\/r\/t Scripture. For example, it\u2019s almost impossible to see<\/em> the role friendship really plays in the Bible, or the role celibacy plays in the New Testament, if the only Christian culture you know is contemporary evangelicalism. (That\u2019s only slightly less true of contemporary American Catholicism, too.) Coles does some necessary work rediscovering what is really in Scripture. That project would be deepened and strengthened by rediscovering how previous Christian societies have understood<\/a> and lived out <\/a>that Scriptural witness.<\/p>\n

That said, Coles\u2019s book is good<\/em> and so few books on this subject are! Recommended. Keep tissues handy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"