Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, said that Christians and Jewish people who oppose homosexual relationships on biblical grounds were applying double standards unless they also believed in some of the more obscure commands in the Old Testament.
He told a debate on gay marriage in London that religious texts had to be reinterpreted for new generations meaning, he argued, that same sex couples should be allowed to marry.
– full report at Daily Telegraph
The hand of Adonai was upon me, and it carried me away by the spirit ofAdonai and set me down in a valley – a valley full of bones. God made me walk up and down among them. And I saw that there was a vast number of bones lying there in the valley, and they were very dry. God asked me, “Mere mortal, can these bones live?”
I answered, “Only you know that, Sovereign Adonai.”And God said, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: ‘Dry bones, hear the word of Adonai! Sovereign Adonai says to these bones: I am going to breathe life into you. I will fasten sinews on you, clothe you with flesh, cover you with skin, and give you breath. And you will live; and you will know that I am Sovereign Adonai.”Ezekiel 37:1-6
As a queer person of faith, do you ever grow tired? In the midst of the daily struggle for acceptance rest can be nothing more than a diminutive oasis in a vast desert. Worn out, dried up, and half buried by the sands of scorn, our bones lie scattered across the shifting dunes of indifference.
Water cannot revive these bones, nor can bandages knit back together what the vultures of contempt have torn apart. Only the force of life itself can revive what decay has claimed.
For Ezekiel the life giving force of the universe was the word of God – the divine creative energy dancing across the cosmos. Such energy brought into being the thoughts and aspirations of the Sacred.
– full reflection at Bible in Drag
An eastern Louisville Baptist church has ordained an openly gay man as a minister with unanimous support from church members.
Highland Baptist Church on Sunday ordained Maurice “Bojangles” Blanchard, a local gay-rights advocate who started the church’s gay and lesbian outreach group last year.
Church Pastor Joe Phelps says ordaining Blanchard was “new territory” for the church but in April it moved to support his ordination.
The Fairness Campaign, a Louisville-based gay rights organization, hailed Blanchard’s ordination as 1 of only about two dozen at Baptist churches in the U.S.
b. May 29, 1947
“It’s not so much a dream as a calling from God.”
b. May 16, 1929
Adrienne Rich is one of the leading American poets. Her ability to combine poetry with politics has made her a model for poets and activists.
Adrienne Rich became a published poet in 1951 at the age of 21, when W. H. Auden selected her first book, A Change of World, for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She has published nearly twenty volumes of poetry and several books of non-fiction.
Rich’s poetry has been honored with numerous awards including the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her collection of poems Diving into the Wreck received the 1974 National Book Award. The American Academy of Poets bestowed the Wallace Stevens Award on Rich in 1997 for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”
“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” Rich’s 1971 celebrated address to the Modern Language Association, challenged many traditional assumptions of literary scholarship and prompted the inclusion of women’s studies and feminist criticism in academia. Rich advocated equality for women, gays, and those disenfranchised by race and class.
Rich is active in movements for GLBT rights, reproductive freedom, and the progressive New Jewish Agenda. In 1981, she received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
In 1997 Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, saying, “Art . . . means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.” In 2003, Rich joined other poets in protesting the war in Iraq by refusing to attend a White House symposium on poetry.
Bibliography:
Selected works by Adrienne Rich:
When the seventh month arrived – the people having settled in their own villages – they assembled in Jerusalem as one body. Then Jeshua begot of Jozadak, together with the other priests, and Zerubbabel begot of Shealtiel, together with his family, began the building of the altar of the God of Israel so that they might make burnt offerings as was stipulated in the law of Moses, the godly one. They built the altar first, for they lived in fear of the peoples who lived around them…
Ezra 3:1-3a
LGBT Altar by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin @ http://ohlson.se/. Full story @ http://jesusinlove.blogspot.com/
Fear is a powerful motivator. The cruelty that we enact due to fear is limitless. We slander, we provoke, we rationalize, we even kill. In the spiritual realm fear casts just as strong a shadow. Take for example the bullying behavior of those who fear the Sacred. As opposed to the behavior of those who love the Sacred.
 |
There can be no light without the darkness out of which it shines. |  |
b. May 21, 1925
d. Oct 12, 2011
The momentum is there, and that’s not going to be stopped. It’s moved from hopes of a grass-roots movement, to the actuality of a grass-roots movement. And it’s taken 40 years to do it.
My sisters and brothers, if you should wander from the truth and another should bring you back, remember that whoever turns sinners from the error of their ways saves them from death and cancels a multitude of sins.
James 5:19-20
James is a tough book to read. It enjoys its present position toward the end of the Greek Scriptures due to the great reformer Martin Luther who considered it a “right strawy epistle.” Although in Luther’s defense, it appears he missed the major emphasis of this book: faith formation as the key element in communal living.
I can also commensurate with James – it takes hard, hard work to build the beautiful community. That is the community where justice and righteousness or harmony and balance mark all relationships.
James (in theory the brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem) is interested in the question of power. Particularly the question of how power plays out in a community of equality. James exhorts us to be stringent in the disciplines of the faith. These disciplines call on us to relinquish our hold on control, turn to those in need, and let go of carefully crafted priorities so they may be replaced by priorities of the crucified and resurrected One.
-full reflection at The Bible in Drag
Well, it’s been quite a whirlwind week for same-sex marriage, from North Carolina to Obama to Colorado—and, of course, to the many outraged conservatives concerned with preserving traditional marriage, i.e., the time-honored sacred bond between one man and one woman. Why, just last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said that marriage has meant just that for over five thousand years.
Huh?
Time to break out your Bible, Mr. Perkins! Abraham had two wives, Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar. King Solomon had 700 wives, plus 300 concubines and slaves. Jacob, the patriarch who gives Israel its name, had two wives and two concubines. In a humanist vein, Exodus 21:10 warns that when men take additional wives, they must still provide for their previous one. (Exodus 21:16 adds that if a man seduces a virgin and has sex with her, he has to marry her, too.)
But that’s not all. In biblical society, when you conquered another city, tribe, or nation, the victorious men would “win” their defeated foes’ wives as part of the spoils. It also commanded levirate marriage, the system wherein, if a man died, his younger brother would have to marry his widow and produce heirs with her who would be considered the older brother’s descendants. Now that’s traditional marriage!
– full post at Jay Michaelson, Religion Dispatches.
Queer Church News 