With all God’s love, I hope you’re well.
I was overjoyed to hear your reports from the conference you recently completed with AJ Levine, Harold Attridge, and Brendan Robertson under the supervision of Fr. James Martin. I, too, often find that when I am on the verge of delivering well-prepared and thoroughly planned notes in nearly any venue that God changes my plans, and usually what I end up saying in the moment is better and more important than it might otherwise have been had my first and even third drafts gone ahead to press (or lectern, or this damned machine, more often). And in any event, I think that the fact that your talk focused more on reading the Bible for formation, and the ways that LGBTQ+ Christians are able to make use of scripture for understanding their vocation, especially in the event that their vocation is one of celibacy in the ecclesial community, is the more important witness, as it speaks to your personal experience with Christ and what you can draw on from it to offer guidance to others.
I am also glad you agree on the trilemma as I traced it in our personal correspondence. It seems to me that, rightly or wrongly, the following facts frame any conversation around LGBTQ+ Christians (which is a different but related conversation to that of Christianity and LGBTQ+ rights and flourishing in wider society). First, the Mainline churches that were the most open, affirming, and receptive to openly LGBTQ+ Christians are dwindling; the current statistics are, in fact, tragic for anyone who has fond memories of and relations to any of those traditions (and the Episcopal Church will forever have a colonnade porch in my heart, just as there also the Church of England enjoys a medieval parish church and an inn around the corner). I find the typical argument of conservative Christians that this is due, whether by divine punishment or human nature, to the liberalization of those communities to be disingenuous in the extreme, as well as wrong.
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