The Bible and Homosexuality

If this is an issue you're seriously interested in, you'll set aside 67 minutes to hear the full lecture.  This remarkable young man says everything that needs saying.  Dan Savage provides some background:

Matthew Vines is a young gay man who grew up in Kansas. His family is Christian and very conservative. After coming out, Vines took two years off college to research and think deeply about what the bible says—and doesn't say—about homosexuality. You could argue that what Vines has to say is irrelevant to non-Christians. But Vines' argument and his insights are highly relevant to gay Christians, to their families, to Christians who point to the bible to justify their bigotry and the pain they inflict on LGBT people (including their own LGBT children), and to anyone who happens to live in a country that is majority Christian. Vines delivered these remarks at College Hill United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kansas, earlier this month. Watch this video: Vines is brilliant. He has a post up at Huffington Post that gives some context and background. Go read it.

Nostalgia

"One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun."  --  Kitty Burns Florey, on the lost art of diagramming sentences

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/a-picture-of-language/?ref=opinion 

Quote for the Day

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow toward the illegal and dangerous methods.”

An unnamed physician explains to Frank Bruni why he performs abortions.  The full story is here.  I abhor abortion but like many Catholics I want it to be safe and legal.

Mental Health Break

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz3CPzdCDws

Slain for His Flock

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, here, some pieces of the homily he was giving in a hospital chapel, cut short by an assassin's bullet:

You have just heard in Christ’s gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who try to fend off the danger will lose their lives, while those who out of love for Christ give themselves to the service of others, will live, live like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone. The harvest comes about only because it dies, allowing itself to be sacrificed in the earth and destroyed. Only by undoing itself does it produce the harvest....

This is the hope that inspires us as Christians. We know that every effort to better society, especially when justice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.... Of course, we must try to purify these ideals, Christianize them, clothe them with the hope of what lies beyond. That makes them stronger, because it gives us the assurance that all that we cultivate on earth, if we nourish it with Christian hope, will never be a failure. We will find it in a purer form in that kingdom where our merit will be found in the labor that we have done here on earth....

Dear brothers and sisters, let us all view these matters at this historic moment with that hope, that spirit of giving and of sacrifice. Let us all do what we can. We can all do something, at least have a sense of understanding and sympathy....

[I]t is worthwhile to labor, because all those longings for justice, peace, and well-being that we experience on earth become realized for us if we enlighten them with Christian hope. We know that no one can go on forever, but those who have put into their work a sense of very great faith, of love of God, of hope among human beings, find it all results in the splendors of a crown that is the sure reward of those who labor thus, cultivating truth, justice, love, and goodness on earth. Such labor does not remain here below but, purified by God’s Spirit, is harvested for our reward. 

The holy Mass, now, this Eucharist, is just such an act of faith. To Christian faith at this moment the voice of diatribe appears changed for the body of the Lord, who offered himself for the redemption of the world, and in this chalice the wine is transformed into the blood that was the price of salvation. May this body immolated and this blood sacrificed for humans nourish us also, so that we may give our body and our blood to suffering and to pain --- like Christ, not for self, but to bring about justice and peace for our people.

Let us join together, then, intimately in faith and hope at this moment of prayer....

At that, a postscript reads thus: "a shot rang out in the chapel and Archbishop Romero fell mortally wounded. He died within minutes, on arriving at a nearby hospital emergency room."

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-memoriam.html