For today, 31st July, the first lectionary reading in the Revised Common Lectionary (but not the Catholic lectionary) is that of Jacob wrestling with the angel. In this post, which was first published on 14th March this year, Bart covers rather…
Tag Archive for God
The Pleasure Principle (Part 2 – A Paradigm for Sexual Transgression)
[Part 1 of this post here. I am indebted to Christopher King’s chapter on the “Song of Songs” (hereafter SOS) in the Queer Bible Commentary (hereafter QBC; pages 356-70) for his insights on this most controversial of biblical books] I…
Pride and Joy!
Gay Pride events culminate this week (roughly from the last weekend in June to the first weekend in July, with today, 27 June being the actual anniversary). I have often wondered why the word Pride is used to mark the…
The Fruit of the Spirit, and the Well-rounded Character
Having prayed for the Spirit of God to fill our hearts and guide our lives, it’s time to take the message of Pentecost further. In fact, what I’d like to do is address an issue I’d been studying over the…
I Will Not Leave You Orphaned
Come, thou Father of the poor, Come with treasures which endure; Come, thou light of all that live! (from the sequence for Pentecost) As I promised in my last post, in preparation for Pentecost I will expand further on the…
Queering Genesis: “Male and Female (And Others) He Created Them”
The first, most obvious, feature of Genesis 1 & 2 has to be that it is a celebration of God’s creation – all of it. Before we get to the “male and female” bit, let’s consider the rest. On the…
Fr Owen O’Sullivan on Gay Inclusion (Pt 7): We will be judged on how we have loved
Many of the passengers on the 9/11 flights, when told they were going to die, phoned their families to say that they loved them. In former times, we might have thought that a better response would have been to beg…
Fr Owen O’Sullivan on Gay Inclusion (Pt 6): Liberating our theology of sexual relationships from the Church
In some recent posts, I have responded to a reader who pointed to the sixth commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, by pointing out that so much of orthodox sexual teaching has nothing to do with adultery. This commandment has…
Coming out as Grace: Patrick Chen, on the “Out Christ”
In the second instalment of his long essay on Christology, sin and grace at “Jesus in Love Blog”, the theologian Patrick Chen discusses Christ’s incarnation as God “coming out” to the world. This is an idea I first came across…
Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard’s name is one to be reckoned with. Although today we usually use the term “Renaissance Man” to indicate one with a wide range of learning to his credit, perhaps we should also recognize in a similar way some extraordinary…
