If friendship needs to be seen afresh in our time as an intimate love in its own right, distinct from the love of spouses or romantic partners, then we need stories of friendship that show us how its rediscovery is possible. I’m always on the lookout for such stories, and I just finished reading one of the best I’ve encountered in some time, Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship.

Published a couple of years ago, Caldwell’s book narrates her friendship with a fellow writer, Caroline Knapp. The two women met in middle age, both of them unmarried at the time. They quickly discovered they both shared love of dogs and the outdoors, and some of the most artful prose of the book describes Caldwell and Knapp’s frequent rowing on a lake near their respective homes and their walks in the adjacent woods. Eventually, their friendship led to deeper intimacies and a mutual disclosure of their drinking histories. Both women were sober when they became friends, but their past addictions cemented their sense of solidarity with one another. (Caldwell’s description of the spiral into addiction is unblinking and one of the real gifts of this book.)

Continue reading →

Here is a line of thought I’ve tried to develop a bit before:

Too often we Christians are heard as saying something along the following lines: “Your life of casual sex (or cohabitation, or homosexuality) surely must be leading you to feel empty, unfulfilled, and jaded. But we have the solution for those unpleasant feelings!” To which the reply is often: “I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t feel excessively guilty or ashamed or unfulfilled. On the contrary, my gay partnership has given me more emotional peace than I’ve ever had.”

In other words, we Christians are often found making Stendahl’s mistake: in our rush to defend our understanding of sin and human flourishing, we too easily assume that the same emotions must be the universal human result of certain behavioral choices. When those expected emotions aren’t present—when Paul, for instance, feels no guilt after persecuting the early Christians—we’re suddenly left wondering what went wrong with our doctrine of sin.

I’m not sure I’ve said it here any better than I’ve attempted to say it in the past, but perhaps bringing in the counterpoint between Stendahl and Bonhoeffer will turn out to be illuminating for others, as it was for me.

I’ve got a brief list in the latest issue of Christianity Today of some books I’ve found useful in thinking through gay Christian questions.

The editors limited me to five, and I would have liked to include a couple of others (like Oliver O’Donovan’s Church in Crisis, for instance), but, honestly, at this point, there simply aren’t as many good books out there on these matters as you might think. I’m hoping that will change soon, with both Eve Tushnet and a couple of others associated with this blog working on new projects…

Stay tuned.

My review of Justin Lee’s new book, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, is up over at Christianity Today.

An excerpt:

Many of us evangelicals may believe that LGBTQ ("lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning") folks are far removed from our churches and ministries. Surely gays and lesbians are out there, somewhere else, not here in our discipleship small groups, or kneeling at the Communion rail beside us—are they? But if Lee, the God Boy of his high school who could quote John 3:16 in his sleep, is an example of what it means to be "gay," then yes, they are. They’re here in our churches, and they’re here to stay, forcing us to reconsider what it might mean to love our own spiritual siblings.

For me, this is where the real importance of Justin’s book lies. For quite a while now, evangelical Christians have been able to take for granted that "gay affirming" theology and pastoral practice is the preserve of liberal, mainline denominations. But what Justin’s book forces us to recognize is that many people inside the evangelical movement—who are otherwise very traditional in doctrine and practice—are experiencing a shift in their convictions about homosexuality. I don’t presume to know what this might mean for the future of evangelicalism, but I think it’s a significant point to observe.

I hope many people read Justin’s book. Despite my strong disagreements with it, I think it’s smart, thoughtful, charitable, and shows a remarkable commitment to take the Bible seriously.