Quest

John Ashman

Robinson, J. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. The Columba Press. ISBN 9781856076605.

Six years ago on the recommendation of a friend I read Rabbi Jesus, an Intimate Biography by Bruce Chilton, an American Episcopalian (i.e. Anglican) priest and professor. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries, new translations and interpretations of ancient texts, Chilton makes some astonishing claims about the life, influences, and teachings of Jesus. Had those claims been made in earlier centuries Chilton would almost certainly have been condemned as a heretic and thus suffered the consequences, possibly even leading to his execution. It was one of the books that I could not put down as it rewards the reader with a refreshing, revolutionary and, indeed, shocking portrait of Jesus’ ideas and beliefs that certainly challenge – many would say, undermine – the Church’s understanding of the identity of the central figure of the Christian faith.

Fortunately I suffered no ill effects, no lightning strikes, or loss of faith as a result of reading Rabbi Jesus, but I was left wondering whether the Jesus we seek to serve and follow has been masked, even distorted, by the present structures, historic teachings and doctrines that have accumulated over two millennia. We are entitled to ask, as the disciples once did, ‘If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly’. The present Pope has contributed volumes to increase our understanding of Jesus, including his remarkable two volume work, Jesus of Nazareth, but he has done so from within the rarefied atmospheres of, first, academia and, latterly, the Vatican. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who was auxiliary Bishop in the archdiocese of Sydney from 1984 to 2004, is exceptional in that he dares to say that one of the ugliest events to emerge from the Catholic Church, namely the sexual abuse of minors and the concealment of that abuse by church authorities, stands in complete contradiction of everything that Jesus lived and taught. In Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church he speaks not only as a bishop who, in 1994, was elected by his fellow Australian bishops to head the National Committee for Professional Standards, coordinating the response of the Church in Australia to revelations of sexual abuse, but, he confesses he was himself the victim of sexual abuse when he was a child, albeit the abuser was not a priest or religious. Read more…

Kevin T. Kelly

Todd A. Salzman & Michael G. Lawler, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology. Georgetown University Press, 2008.

Salzman and Lawler are two lay and married moral theologians in the US. They have made a name for themselves as challenging thinkers, especially in the field of sexual ethics. In The Sexual Person they offer a thorough overhaul of sexual ethics in the light of the person-centred theological vision undergirding Vatican II. I suspect that very many of my fellow moral theologians will accept, as I do, much of what is found in this book, both at a general theoretical level and in their teasing out the implications for everyday life.

They take their starting point from Vatican II’s emphasis on the nature of the human person, as found in the Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes (GS). GS’s opening chapter is entitled, “The Dignity of the Human Person”. That is a kind of banner headline for its approach to morality, including issues in the field of sexual and marital ethics. A few bishops at Vatican II argued that sexual acts as such had their own specific nature over and above the nature of the human person. This was not accepted and n.51 of GS was worded very precisely to bring out this point. (cf. my New Directions in Moral Theology, pp.29-30) Moreover, the Drafting Committee insisted that this was “a general principle” which applied right across the board: “Human activity must be judged insofar as it refers to the human person integrally and adequately considered”. In fact, Humanae Vitae provoked such widespread criticism precisely because it seemed to disregard this key principle. The same is true regarding the current official teaching of the Church denying the goodness of sexual love in faithful homosexual relationships. Read more…

Michael Bennett

Paul Bailey. Chapman’s Odyssey. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

This book is well worth reading; it is in turn funny, witty and touching in places and tells a good story.

The narrative is set in a hospital ward as an older gay man, Harry Chapman, hears ‘many voices’ and recalls memories from his life. Whilst he awaits surgery/investigations, the detailed and rich drama of recollections happens over a period of days nearly a week, but spanning all of Harry’s life! The voices are from his past plus a few historical surprises too! Paul Bailey is a master with words, so much so that by the end of reading this book you know Harry‘s character and his response to a lifetime of pain and pleasure.

I did wonder at one time if Harry was a stereotyped gay man – very arty, cultured and a writer of some sorts, but on the whole he is likeable for what he is .

The ending was a surprise to this reviewer, but I agree with Ali Smith who has some blurb on the back cover: ‘I love this beautiful book’.

Kieran Bohan

Barbara Glasson. The Exuberant Church: Listening to the Prophetic People of God. Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 978-0-232-528619

One of the speakers at the Quest Conference in 2010 was the Reverend Doctor Barbara Glasson, a Methodist minister currently working in Bradford. Previously she led Somewhere Else, the community which hosts meetings of the Quest Liverpool group. As she prepared to leave Liverpool Barbara began a series of conversations with Kieran, other representatives of Quest and Storm, an ecumenical LGBT Christian group, and other people marginalised by mainstream faith groups. Her newly published book, The Exuberant Church, is the result of these conversations about how LGBT Christians, and other ‘coming-out people’, may be prophetic examples of the potential for new life and growth in the faith communities from which they spring. The text of her Conference talks form the basis of this book, hence they could not be published on the Quest website as usual. Barbara plans to launch her book at the Quest conference [This text was published in Spring 2011 - editor] this summer in recognition of the contribution this ‘prophetic community’ has played in the formation of this work. Here Quest Liverpool Convenor Kieran Bohan reflects on the coming out experience, based on Barbara’s pastoral and theological  insights. 

In writing about the process of ‘coming out’, Barbara Glasson describes how it takes ‘an unusual and specific sort of courage’. As a gay Christian man I can vouch for this from my own experience. And, as the convenor of the Quest group in Liverpool, and the co-ordinator of an LGBT youth group in the city, I think I can say with some authority that courage is indeed a defining characteristic of the process of questioning your identity and becoming something which defies the dominant norms of culture, society and faith. Read more…

Colin Chalmers

Weiss, David R (2008). To the Tune of a Welcoming God. Lyrical reflections on sexuality, spirituality and the wideness of God’s welcome. Minneapolis MN: Langdon Street Press.

I suppose that, if asked what is the issue leading discussion and controversy in the Churches today, most people would say that of same-sex marriage. It is somewhat salutary to go back to an earlier period where the burning issue was one of simple inclusion of GLBT people in the Churches. Not that this issue has disappeared, with all problems solved. It is still very much alive, as is evidenced in the current controversies within both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. This book is centred on one man’s struggle with the issue of inclusion of GLBT persons in his own Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). What makes the book unusual is that the author is not in the typical run of ‘gay activist’: he is a ‘self-confessed’ straight, happily married man with five children. A Lutheran minister, David Weiss held a number of academic posts in Universities and Seminaries throughout the United States, among which was the bastion of American Catholicism, the University of Notre Dame. The book’s subtitle of “Lyrical reflections…” is a good description of its range. In addition to articles of varying length, there are examples of the author’s poetry and a compilation of his hymns, hymns for which he – God bless him – gives explicit permission to copy for use in worship. Read more…

David Walsh

Leviticus 18:22, “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence” – This one sentence from the Torah has caused debate, heartache, and controversy for thousands of years, but it is only in the last few decades after much activism, argument and reinterpretation that some movements in Judaism, notably the progressive ones, have found an accommodation which allows gay Jews to be able to live a Jewish life, as recognised by a community without foregoing their homosexuality as either a ‘lifestyle’ or an ‘identity’. The same, however, cannot be said for Orthodox movements.

Jews of non-Orthodox persuasions, be they Reform, Liberal, Masorti (Conservative) or Reconstructionalist may have pointed differences between them, and yet they all have one basic belief in common. It is generally accepted that the Torah was not neatly transmitted in a packaged form from the heavens as the infallible ‘Word of God’ but was rather the beautiful result of divine inspiration, debate and the experiences of the Jewish people at the time. The key issue here being that the Torah is very much of its time, steeped in the culture and society within which it was created. It is within this context that many progressive Jews have explained away seemingly prohibitive verses with allegedly relate to homosexual behaviour, in much the same way as other practices have been abandoned over the past few thousand years. Read more…

Natalie K. Watson

Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, 2nd ed., Marvin M. Ellison and Kelly Brown Douglas (eds.), Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. ISBN 9780664233662. PB £26.99.

The publication of this book is no doubt a landmark: a completely new edition of what was a pioneering work when it was first published in 1994. The broad range of essays by established scholars reflects a conversation that has indeed grown, emerged and become infinitely more diverse than the contributors to the first edition could have imagined. Here we find well known names such as Carter Heyward, Beverly Wildung Harrison, James Nelson, Kwok Pui-Lan, Judith Plaskow, and indeed two of our own: the late Grace M. Jantzen reflecting on AIDS and Elizabeth Stuart, well known to many Quest members, writing about ‘Disruptive Bodies: Disability, Embodiment, and Sexuality’.

From a scholar’s point of view, there is much here to be considered or indeed enjoyed. Essays such as Dwight N. Hopkins ‘The Construction of the Black Male Body: Eroticism and Religion’ or Patrick S. Cheng’s ‘Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today’ are fascinating insights into the current diversity of the debate. Read more…