Recently in Faith Category

Toby Johnson, Catholic monk turned activist, psychotherapist and spiritual writer, was born in 1945 in San Antonio TX. He entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite. After leaving seminary in 1970, he moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies from which he received a master's in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."

Will Roscoe has been active in the the Gay movement since 1975, when he helped found Lambda, the first Gay/Lesbian organization in Montana. The following year, he served an intern at the National Gay Task Force, and in 1977, as coordinator of the Gay People's Alliance at the University of Oregon, he spearheaded the formation of the Oregon Gay Alliance, a statewide coalition of Gay/Lesbian groups. In 1978, he completed an internship at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, where he coordinated a successful campaign to win United Way funding, the first Lesbian/Gay social service agency in the country to do so. He also served as voter registration coordinator for the No on 6 campaign in San Francisco (the Briggs initiative), registering over 10,000 new voters.

I was not a subtle child. When I was eight, I dropped a huge queer clue on my parents and their closest friends during one of their cocktail parties. I swept into the living room, plopped a tape recorder on the coffee table, and cleared everyone from the Oriental rug. I needed an audience, I told them, while I rehearsed the choreography of the second grade's may day dance.

The music was Abba’s “Super Trouper.” My father gulped a martini as I raced through box steps and ball-heel changes for his high-ranking military buddies. In that moment, my father realized that the Read family’s long history at Virginia Military Institute had died with a thud. His son was a fairy.

More Light Presbyterians

Jesus said unto them...For there are some Eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. [emphasis added.]

Much has been written about the Vatican’s “Instruction” refusing to allow openly gay men enter Catholic seminaries. The first press leaks about the document coincided with the formation of a new effort by the Religion and Faith Program at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in the summer of 2005 that had a twofold mission: (1) to equip religious leaders and lay people alike to speak out about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality from a faith perspective and (2) to work with people of
faith to change the conversation about LGBT equality from within their faith communities.

Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us About the Nature of God and the Universe
Toby Johnson

In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award - winning Gay Spirituality, Toby Johnson further explicates his visionary stance that gay people's nature as outsiders gives them a uniquely powerful perspective on the nature of God and religion. By living outside gender norms, gay people are more open to seeing across boundaries of gender and gain access to a less dualistic outlook on the nature of life. Once again, Johnson approaches this potentially controversial subject matter with -erudition, empathy and visionary speculation and gives meaning to gay consciousness beyond superficial issues of sexual behavior.

Toby Johnson is the editor of White Crane, a quarterly journal of gay men's spirituality, as well as the author of Gay Spirituality. He lives in Wimberley, Texas.

Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith
Justin Edward Tanis

In the introduction to Trans-Gendered, Tanis says: "I intend to write about the ways in which religious communities have contributed to our oppression and occasionally, to our liberation. I want to speak, too, about the beauty and power of our lives. We need to think about how to fight back religiously and spiritually, as well as politically." Tanis largely accomplishes this goal.

The book began as a doctoral dissertation, while Tanis was at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, but it is not designed strictly for the academic world: As Tanis states in the books "I am not particularly interested in theories that do not have practical application for trans lives. Tanis writes in the first person, and weaves his own experience as a transgendered clergy person in with the experiences of other transgender individuals.

Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe
Christopher Penczak

When Christopher Penczak was introduced to Witchcraft, he found a spiritual path that hononred and embraced his homosexuality. Now he has written a book of clearheaded theory and practice that is bound to become a classic. With Gay Witchcraft, Penczak joins the ranks of his forebearers in spirit, gay writers who have taken a tradition and made it home.

Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition
Steven Greenberg

Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Steven Greenberg's ten-year struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with Orthodox Judaism. Employing traditional rabbinic resources, Greenberg presents readers with surprising biblical interpretations of the creation story, the love of David and Jonathan, the destruction of Sodom, and the condemning verses of Leviticus. But Greenberg goes beyond the question of whether homosexuality is biblically acceptable to ask how such relationships can be sacred.