Blogs
"Boy Erased" and the Church
11/14/2018
At the center of the book and movie, “Boy Erased”, written by Garrard Conley, is the so-called conversion or reparative therapy. Conversion or reparative therapy is the dangerous psychological practice of “attempting” to turn a person who self-identifies as LGBTQ to being “straight,” with the underlying misnomer that “straight” is normal and good, and same sex attraction is evil or bad. The 19-year-old college student, Jared (who is really Garrard) is sent to an ex-gay Christian ministry, ...
In Search of a New Home Church for a New Family
11/8/2018
In Search of a New Home Church for a New Family I am writing this blog with a new title in my life: I am a grandpa, or as I am calling myself, “Pops.” My daughter Adrianne and her husband Scott are celebrating the birth of their daughter, Edie! The news of the pregnancy was a note of coming attractions. The actual arrival of the child gave “birth” a whole new and dramatic shift in the tectonic plates of my family’s life. Upon Edie’s delivery into this world, new titles “birthed” too. The next ...
Spirit Alive: Which is More Important, Being Correct...or Learning How to Connect?
11/8/2018
November 6, 2018 With Heart, Soul, and Mind: What's at the Heart of Christian Discipleship? "Teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?" Matthew 22: 36 "Evil is always complex, roundabout, tangled. Goodness is always a reduction of life to simplicity....All great discoveries are a reduction from complexity to simplicity....Life for the Pharisee was very complicated. For Jesus it was very simple. The Pharisees lived by innumerable taboos, regulations, and laws. Jesus reduced these ...
Lessons from the Life of Mathew Shepard
10/31/2018
Lessons from the Life of Matthew Shepard In 1998, outside of Laramie, Wyoming, two men—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson— beat up and robbed Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old college student who happened to be gay. Matthew was pistol whipped and left for dead for 18 hours, tied up to a fence on a remote Wyoming prairie outside of Laramie. He died five days later without regaining consciousness. For two decades, Shepard’s parents—Judith and Dennis—kept their son’s ashes near their home in ...
Changing the Definition of Gender Matters to LGBTQ+ People
10/25/2018
Changing the Definition of “Gender” Matters to LGBTQ People In 1941, there was the creation of a scientific definition of “mental retardation” by Edgar Doll that was approved by the national body known as the American Association on Mental Deficiency (AAMD), and the federal government. This definition considered a person “mentally retarded” based on social incompetence due to mental subnormality, which has been developmentally arrested, which obtains at maturity is of ...
Spirit Alive: Which is More Important, Being Correct...or Learning How to Connect?
10/20/2018
What's at the Heart of Christian Discipleship?
