This post is written by Andrew Marin, President and Founder of The Marin Foundation If I’m being honest, a good part of the reason I moved to St. Andrews, Scotland for my PhD is three-fold. First, it was too good of an opportunity, at too great of a university, that I couldn’t pass it up. Second, a PhD will only continue to help the work of The Marin Foundation. And third, I needed to get away for a time. The... Read more
This post is written by Andrew Marin, President and Founder of The Marin Foundation In light of this past decade’s thoroughly outspoken partisan activists (where nothing short of full social, political, and religious alignment will satisfy their thirst for defining “success”) I often wonder what is the epistemological root of “good” activism? Where does “good” activism stem from? Stepping back a moment, the question one must ask is, What ontological forces drive activism; and how can one measure what is,... Read more
This post is written by Andrew Marin, President and Founder of The Marin Foundation I woke up this morning in beautiful Scotland to an email with a link where someone wrote the following: I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” -Martin Luther King, Jr I’m looking at you, Andrew Marin To no one’s surprise, the person who wrote that heartfelt statement about me... Read more
The following post was written by Kevin Harris, Director of Community Relations at The Marin Foundation. Reading over Jacob Heiss’s well thought-out posts on sexual identity (parts 1 & 2 with part 3 on the way), I’m left thinking that this might be an area (among others) in which the evangelical church could be assisted by the LGBT community. I’m not trying to imply that *LGB individuals are more capable when it comes to constructing sexual identity, as I simply do... Read more
We’re so focused on drawing firm lines around what we should not do that we spend almost no time on who we are and how we can experience sexual fulfillment. This dehumanizes us and depersonalizes sex. Read more
This post is written by Andrew Marin, President and Founder of The Marin Foundation. One of the biggest hinderances that stifles the work of reconciliation is memory. What we remember, especially of negative events, becomes for most not just a memory but a conviction. It is that powerful conviction which keeps us cycling in a cognitive space of being-wronged, victimized, and in certain situations, working towards the certainty of retribution. Yet we must remember, as Harvard neuropsychologist Daniel Schacter says,... Read more
The following post is by Jason Bilbrey, Director of Pastoral Care at The Marin Foundation. You can read more from Jason at his blog, www.jasonbilbrey.com. I was recently having lunch with a friend. Great guy. Conservative in a mainstream Evangelical way and also really bright, reasonable and charitable. I’ve known him for years. We were talking about (what else, right?) homosexuality and the LGBT community. “I never know how to engage in this conversation,” he said. “It’s not like I... Read more
For our upcoming Living in the Tension gathering on Monday, November 18, we will be discussing singleness in relation to our broader culture and our respective faith traditions. What are the joys and frustrations that you experience (or did experience) with singleness? What does it look like to be single and a sexual being even if a person is not engaging in sex? What can faith communities do to more fully utilize you and show that single people are valued?... Read more
Warren Perry is a teacher and coach, Southerner and Yankee, sinner and saint living in the tension in New York City. He can be reached at [email protected]. Throughout my life, I experienced a number of changes at school, with friends, and in jobs. But one mainstay that provided a deep sense of grounding and stability was having a church community to call home. No church is perfect; it is just a local, human embodiment of the universal Church and Body... Read more
As a result, many evangelical Christians are woefully inept at loving gay folks well. Predictably, we don’t love ourselves much better—even when our sexual orientation and behavior lines up perfectly with the best-case scenario recommendation of our sexual ethic since we developed that ethic in the absence of a robust concept of sexual identity. Why do we do keep doing this and what’s at stake? What might change for the better if evangelical Christians took a solid crack at exploring sexual identity directly rather than avoiding the matter or reverting to clichés and subcritical, scriptural misapplications? Here’s the first of a series of posts on this topic and why it makes such a huge difference for our lives and those we have been guided by God to love. Read more
Love is an Orientation
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