Wednesday, January 19, 2005

First Things First:

So what's a busy second-year law student doing starting a blog? And aren't there enough blogs already?

Well, the truth is that I already have too many things on my plate, and there are now thousands of blogs out there. So, let me say a few things about what I hope to accomplish with "Reweaving the Rainbow."

Starting this week and next I expect to have daily posts exploring the intersection of faith, sexuality, and daily life. My goal in these posts will be to dispell the notion, held by many (most?) Christians, that homosexual relationships are inherently sinful, psychologically and socially harmful, and thus unworthy of the social, spiritual and legal status of marriage. And what I think will set me apart from others writing on this issue will be a focus on the theological and ethical issues posed by homosexuality.

Thus where some writers might look to Thomas Jefferson, Justice Kennedy, or Michel Foucault for guidance, I will be looking to Saints Paul, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, the reformers Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, the great Christian hymn-writers (known and unknown), and, of course, more recent Christian thinkers ranging from C.S. Lewis to Stanley Hauerwas to Pope John Paul II.

And yet the debate within the Church about homosexuality -- and, hence, within America’s still-predominately Christian culture -- is not simply a matter of theology or moral philosophy. It is also a matter of common experience. “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit,” Jesus said (Matt. 7:18), and I suspect that most of us, when confronted by something new like gay marriage, will have this logic in the back of our mind as we try to make sense of it and determine whether it is something to be feared, tolerated, or celebrated.

For that reason, I will also write about experiences from daily life: the spat my boyfriend and I had last night, various thoughts about the meaning of sexuality and gender identity occassioned by phenomena of popular culture like ABC's Desperate Housewives and the film Kinsey, and even the recent birth of my ex-girlfriend's first child and how different this experience is from that of most gay men whose relationships tend not to focus on parenthood.

My hope is that these seemingly disparate posts will, over time, provide the sort of evidence that the Church needs--and should expect--as it reckons with the claim of gay and lesbian Christians that it can be said of our relationships, no less than our heterosexual counterparts, "that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).

Such, at any rate, is my hope, and to that end I invite discussion from those Christians who are not (yet) persuaded as well as the secular gays and lesbians who cannot imagine the Church being anything but an enemy to our movement.

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