Checking the news before packing up to head to church and then to the airport for our trip to Jolly Olde, I noted this L.A. Times feature article by Rebecca Trounson:Church divide over gays has a global audience
More from the other side of the pond!
Happy Sunday, everybody!
6 comments:
Will you take this time to reconsider your position?
I’m not sure this is the right place for my two comments, but I can’t find a better one.
First of all, heartfelt thanks to Susan for her leadership, her strong and clear voice during these trying times when gay and lesbians are included, discussed, not included, marginalized and often treated like an embarrassment for the Church. Her calm reflections have been of enormous help to me as I struggle with belonging to this branch of Christ’s church. To say “thank you” seems completely inadequate.
However, the historian in me has to object to the first part of the slogan Susan quotes from Joan Chittister, “Nothing we do changes the past…” I have great respect for Joan Chittister and have read her columns with much interest. However, for me that statement is just wrong.
The past isn’t some object back there like a tree or a mountain. “It” only exists in our understanding of the people of the past, what they did and said. That process of understanding is the enterprise we call history. And that understanding of the past changes all the time.
When I was a young grad student working on the history of seventeenth-century Scotland, it never occurred to anyone in the department at the University of Edinburgh (all men, of course) to ask questions (and therefore understand) about anyone except men. For all serious purposes, the seventeenth-century Scottish church was an all-male affair.
Since then, of course, historians have asked many new questions about that church—questions about women and children and uninfluential people and gays and lesbians, etc. As a result the Scottish past, i.e. our understanding of that past, has changed drastically—it’s a richer, more diverse and fuller past. Far from being unchanging, the past changes a little every time a good historian writes a creative book with new insights.
In fact one of the ways we change the future is by changing our understanding of the past, in other words by changing the past. For example, how many times has the changing understanding of the way mid-19th century churches used scripture to support slavery influenced our own understanding of the way scripture is misused today to justify homophobia.
I’m sorry to criticize a good, snappy slogan like Susan’s quote. Unfortunately historians seem to enjoy poking holes in a lot of popular assumptions about the past. I wish I could suggest a better slogan for Susan, but all my efforts sound a little lame. Even so, I must gently protest a slogan which—unintentionally, I’m sure—makes light of the hard and often dull work of many historians, including me.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a small point—especially beside the grand work that Susan is doing for all of us gay and lesbian folk. Let me conclude then with another “Thank you.”
(The Rev) Guy Roland Foster, Professor Emeritus, GTS
Dan ... ummm, no.
Guy ... point well taken. (I was a history undergrad ... it's what I got my BA in!)
If you had said that you were coming I'd have baked a cake.
madpriest ... JUST arrived ... travel weary but here. Outside my window at the Piccadilly Hotel is a red London bus parked in front of a McDonald's.
Ah, to be in England ...!
Hi Susan
Couldn't find an e-mail address for you so thought you might want to pick these up in London. I wrote to Canterbury Cathedral to see if they will sell on their website.
" Primates to star on top of Christmas trees"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/14/nfaith314.xml
I am SO getting these! n It reminds me of a variation on the old risque' Christmas joke "How The Angel Got On Top of the Christmas Tree" Short version. Santa has been having a really bad week, nothing is going his way. After a succession of visitors with increasingly bad news, Santa is at the end of his rope and is very angry. He hears a knock on his office door and an angel comes in with the annual Christmas tree. The angel says "Where do you want me to put this?"
Brian from T19
Post a Comment