Monthly Archives: June 2014

Saturday Symposium: On Eros and Agape

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Hello everyone! It’s hard to believe that it’s already Saturday. Lindsey was traveling last week, which has slowed down our email responses a bit. Thanks for your patience while we get back to you!

Now it’s time for today’s Saturday Symposium question:

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week’s question comes to us from a conversation between two readers. Our friend Dan wrote a fantastic guest post called Erotic Eucharist: Nurturing Deep Attraction Between Friends. We want to invite you to participate in a conversation between Dan and Evan discussing the following questions: What is the role of eros in friendships? How do we experience embodied intimacy within friendship? Is it beneficial to distinguish between eros and agape? What distinguishes eros from agape? Is philia distinct from eros? Is it important to draw clear lines to divide philia, eros, and agape?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Perspectives, Persecution, and #TakeDownThatPost

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This post is our second contribution to the What Persecution Is series that we are exploring with Jake Dockter at The Great White Whale. This series explores faith, gender, sexuality, race, culture, and identity. We’ll be posting one post a week for this series over the next several weeks. We’d love for you to join the conversation. Please let us know if you’re posting any related content on your own blog, so we can talk with you. You can read Jake’s most recent contributions to the series here and here.

In last week’s post, we opened our discussion about persecution by exploring the role of silencing. It was an odd juxtaposition of themes because the night before our post on silencing went live, we had tweeted the following:

Some context: several of our friends on Twitter were using the hashtag #TakeDownThatPost to raise awareness about an ill-conceived reflection from a youth-pastor-turned-sex-offender. Leadership Journal had given the anonymous convicted sex offender a platform to describe a sexual relationship between a youth pastor and a student in his youth group as a mutual, extramarital affair. We agreed that especially because of this publication’s intended audience (people in pastoral leadership roles), the editors of Leadership Journal needed to take a critical look at this article, and we posted our tweet.

By the time we checked Twitter the morning our blog post released, we had received some messages suggesting that we were hypocrites because we had shared extended thoughts about how silencing can be the beginning of persecution while seemingly arguing for some degree of internet censorship regarding a difficult conversation topic in the church. People wanted to know, were we engaging in a sort of doublespeak, claiming that we should be able to share our story about life together while actively trying to block a repentant sex offender from sharing his story? Some of our readers asked if we were aware of the various obstacles that make it difficult for convicted sex offenders to reintegrate into society.

Truth be told, we each have different reasons for discerning carefully questions of how society should approach reintegration of convicted sex offenders. Lindsey has personally been considering many facets of this issue after learning in 2012 that some churches have been offering or at least considering adults-only services so that registered sex offenders can attend without violating their parole. Lindsey has been surprised at how aspects of sex offender registries can create challenging legal issues, such as the social stigmatization and penalizing of juvenile offenders years after they have reached adulthood and the difficulties that legally of-age high school students can face when dating someone barely underage. Sarah is a survivor of sexual abuse, and much like the young girl described in the article in question, Sarah was a middle school student when the abuse began, and the abuser was in a position of leadership in a church. Sarah has encountered many incredibly judgmental reactions when people have learned that Sarah has forgiven the perpetrator and would be interested in understanding more deeply why he did what he did. Many of these people have reactions rooted in a belief that only survivors’ stories should be told because any story from the perspective of an abuser would invalidate a survivor’s story.

We have two entirely different sets of experience that we bring to discussing this issue, but neither of us would argue for silencing repentant sex offenders. We find it exceptionally important to navigate the tension between arguing against silencing and simultaneously advocating that the church change the tenor of particular conversations. While asserting that all people the space to share their stories, there’s good reason for us to be concerned that certain approaches to difficult topics can result in stories being used as weapons.

Persecution can occur when certain stories become weaponized. This is just as relevant to stories about LGBT issues as it is to stories about sexual violence. We can appreciate the authenticity of stories like that of Rosaria Butterfield–a heterosexually married Christian woman who previously identified as a lesbian–while simultaneously affirming that the way Wheaton College handled student concerns about her speaking engagement has made LGBTQ students perceive that the campus has no place for their stories. Many LGBTQ Christians have had to fight for the right to share their stories amidst dominant cultural narratives that suggest being gay is a choice and it’s possible for gay people to become straight. As a celibate, LGBT, Christian couple, we’d be deluding ourselves if we failed to acknowledge that some cisgender, heterosexual Christians see our way of life as some sort “ideal” for LGBT Christians. We try to do whatever we can to prevent people from weaponizing our story, but we know that we cannot control how people pitch us and our story to their friends. There’s nothing we can do to prevent others from pointing at the gay couple next door and saying, “Why can’t you be in a celibate partnership like Lindsey and Sarah?” But seriously, we do not recommend celibate partnership as a way of life for all LGBT Christians. If you have used our story as a weapon against your LGBT friends, can you a) stop it, b) apologize for the way your actions have brought harm, and c) practice showing love in the midst of difference?

We decided to participate in #TakeDownThatPost because we thought the article in question was full of linguistic weapons with potential to re-traumatize survivors. The original version portrayed a sexual relationship between a youth pastor and a likely middle school-aged student as a) an extramarital affair, b) a mutual relationship, c) an innocent friendship that went too far, and d) a shared experience of sin and temptation. It is absolutely wrong-headed, misguided, and soul-crushing to suggest that middle-school aged students knowingly and willfully “seduce” their pastors, teachers, or coaches. Even aside from Sarah’s story, we know far too many survivors of sexual violence who have suffered under the pervasive societal assumption that they were somehow “asking for it” to happen to them. The anonymous author showed no concern for how his actions impacted the young girl, the church, and the broader community. Despite naming “selfishness” as the main sin that spiraled out of control, his discussion about the impacts of sexual sin was remarkably self-centered and zoomed in on everything the author himself lost as a result of his actions.

When a story has become weaponized, people must step forward in order to prevent further harm. There were a number of courageous people sharing their stories across the internet in an effort to educate Leadership Journal as to why the originally published piece was so problematic. Tamara Rice wrote up a detailed review of what happened when she suggested that #TakeDownThatPost might be a way to amplify survivors’ concerns. Mary DeMuth penned an excellent open letter to the anonymous writer to explain why he needed to grieve how his actions affected other people and to provide some insights regarding what repentance looks like. As we followed developments on our Twitter feed and read pieces from various authors, we noted many thought-provoking conversation starters about how survivors and their stories could inform responses from Christian leaders. The vast majority of tweets we saw that were tagged with #TakeDownThatPost argued for meaningful, authentic, and solution-focused dialogue.

Advocating for safe spaces for all people is the antithesis of persecuting others. As we think about civil conversations on important issues in the Church, we keep asking the question, “How do we create safe spaces for everyone to share ideas freely?” The anonymous man writing from jail may be of the opinion that he had an entirely mutual relationship with the young girl in his youth group. He is free to write that down in the journal he may keep under his pillow, in letters to his close friends, on his personal blog, or in other venues available to him. It is probably good for him to get his thoughts on paper, so he can reflect more deeply on how his actions were sinful. However, we do not believe it is appropriate for a top-tier magazine targeting Christian leaders to publish a six page sermon describing a sexual relationship between a youth pastor and a child as a mere extramarital affair rather than sexual abuse. Leadership Journal and similar publications have an obligation to Christian leaders to raise thoughtful discussion about preventing sexual abuse, modes of restorative justice, and helping survivors heal from trauma. As we followed #TakeDownThatPost on Twitter, we perceived that its advocates were attempting to educate others on holding constructive conversations about sexual abuse while putting safeguards in place for survivors to participate without shame.

Consumers of a publication, a television show, or any other form of media have the freedom to critique its content. Suggesting that #TakeDownThatPost was an instance of persecution aimed at sex offenders is similarly ludicrous as the suggestion that, for example, A&E was persecuting Phil Robertson (and Christianity) by suspending him from Duck Dynasty. Consumers of A&E who objected to Robertson’s interview were not saying, “We think Phil Robertson and all conservative Christians should be silenced.” Instead, the main message we heard throughout that whole fiasco was, “A&E should not offer a platform to a person who conveys harmful stereotypes about gay people, comparing them to humans who have sex with animals.” As we said in our first post of this series, freedom of speech in America does not mean that you are entitled to escape the social consequences of what you’ve said. And when powerful outlets like Leadership Journal respond to previously silenced people amplifying their voices with direct calls to action like #TakeDownThatPost, we all benefit from the deeper dialogue.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Erotic Eucharist: Nurturing Deep Attraction Between Friends

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Today’s post is a guest reflection by Dan Brennan, author of Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women. We believe it is just as important to give voice to heterosexual experiences of deep, meaningful, relationships outside of marriage as it is to create space for the stories of non-marriage relationships among celibate LGBT Christians. Dan, who has been married to his wife Sheila for several years, has also grown spiritually from a close relationship with his friend Jennifer. We are fascinated by Dan’s work in the area of sacred friendships and are honored to share a sample of his writing with you today. As always when reading guest posts, please keep in mind that everyone’s story is different, and the experiences, perspectives, thoughts, and theological ideas presented by the author will not necessarily match completely with ours. If you are a celibate LGBT Christian or ally, or if you have a story to share that is related to the themes we discuss at A Queer Calling, feel free to Contact Us.

A reflection by Dan Brennan

She sat to my left. Sheila, my beautiful wife, sat to my right. We were about ready to celebrate the Eucharist which we did weekly in our Anglican church. My attraction toward my female friend who regularly sat next to my left was deepening. Before I had any theories about “erotic” Eucharist, before I knew any language to describe “erotic” Eucharist, I was thoroughly processing my attraction.

Looking back on this season in my life nine years later, I can definitely rejoice in the spiritual eros I experienced in participating in the Eucharist at the time. Ever since I became an Anglican several years earlier, I longed to meet Christ every week in the Eucharist. Liturgy was no-run-of-the-mill religious ritual where I went through the motions. The Eucharist was where I celebrated the Feast. Each week I lifted my heart before the Lord’s presence. Christ was my sweet desire in Eucharistic intimacy. The real presence of Christ was my sweet delight. Each Sunday, I yearned for the deep beauty, goodness, and delight of Christ’s presence in drinking “the cup of salvation” and eating “the bread of life.”

So perhaps in hindsight, it was no coincidence I became open to explore the connection between the divine eros in the Eucharist and my deepening attraction toward my female friend.

Before I proceed, I’m honored that Lindsey and Sarah have invited me to write a post on their blog. Ever since I came across their blog a couple of months ago I’ve admired their particular calling and how are they are engaging subjects like chastity, sexuality, friendship, and the LGBT community. I’m writing from a straight white male perspective aware of my privilege. My journey has led me to a deep curiosity of how sexuality and friendship can flourish in close friendships and community. I admire Lindsey and Sarah’s call to celibacy.

Taste and See that the Lord is Good

Opening my desires, my attraction, my longings, and my anxieties while I ate the bread, drank the wine, and fed on Christ’s love and presence was a powerful discipline for me during this season. I had intuitive trust in seeking Christ through Eucharistic intimacy. I had come to know Christ, I had come to receive Christ, and I had come to trust Christ through this intimate connection. Opening my attraction for my female friend to Christ was a natural thing for me to do.

Each week I surrendered my friendship, my attraction, my desire for deeper connection before the Lord as I drank the cup of salvation and ate the bread. Wisdom is better than jewels and all that I desired could not compare with my knowing the sweet and sheer delight of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist (Proverbs 8:10-12; 30).

What is deep attraction? I desired ongoing intimacy with my friend at multiple levels: spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual. Did I have a sexual attraction for her? Or was it a nonsexual longing to deeply connect with her that included physical affection? It’s hard to sort that out when you are opening yourself up to deep attraction. I was not physically attracted to her when we first met. But as our friendship grew she became deeply beautiful in my eyes. But I was fiercely committed to my wife and I was also committed to seeing my friend as more than an object to be pursued for sexual gratification. So what I mean by deep attraction is the desire to connect with the whole person in friendship with passionate commitment to not make a move toward sex.

I was seeking the delight and presence of Christ in the Eucharist among other things. Years later, I would read something Amy Frykhom suggested: “True, deep, real pleasure is an avenue to the Holy” (See Me Naked). That was my intuitive posture as I sought Christ in the weekly Eucharist. I was not seeking self-indulgence. I was seeking the beauty of the Christ I knew in the Eucharist.

My attraction to my friend was utterly paradigm-shifting for me and opened up a whole new world as I sought to bring the wholeness of who she was before Christ in weekly Eucharist. It was conventional wisdom for evangelical men to run away from any kind of deep attraction toward women in which both parties had no romantic potential. I was seeking Christ as my wisdom as I explored this deep attraction; not a conservative list of dos and don’ts.

Too Good To Be True

Nine years later I can say I’m so grateful for the Eucharist and the gift of deep attraction. I have no regrets about continuing to talk about delight, pleasure, and mutual cherishing with a trajectory toward deep attraction in friendship. One of my differences with Christians who are my critics is right here: they think I am promoting something too good to be true for our present culture and world. Some think I’m a “daredevil.” Some think I’m suggesting a practice akin to “emotional dating.”

For many years, my conservative evangelical sexuality prohibited me from experiencing “too good to be true” moments outside of my marriage. In the past 10 years I have intentionally chosen to be open to attraction in friendships—including deep attraction with my other sex friends—with the Eucharist at the heart of integrating my sexuality and my friendships.

As Christians living in a post-Freudian culture, we are going to have to address the question: are we are going to view the Eucharist through a cultural Freudianism or are we going to view the cultural Freudianism through the Eucharist? Viewed through popular Freudianism, sex in a materialistic world is the ultimate, too good to be true story. Viewed through the Eucharist, the ultimate too good to be true story is union/intimacy with God and with one another.

At the center of the Christian faith is the Eucharist which invites us all—straight, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, queer—to this “too good to be true” intimacy where we eat and drink and take in Christ, we digest his body. Eucharistic intimacy summons us to the life and love of Christ, of shared intimacy in the present world but also into a future world. In the midst of chaos and dysfunction, it is hard to believe—‘too good to be true”— deep attraction toward healing, human flourishing, shalom, and deep delight. The Eucharist offers us a narrative where friends know the powerful delight of Christ’s love in this world.

I’ve now lost track of the many “too good to be true” moments in my various female friendships and in my marriage. What a deep joy to experience too good to be true moments with Sheila as a result of/in the midst of our other friendships. If we have good marriages, families, friendships, we all experience moments of that kind. But I am deliberately including those moments birthed of deep pleasure and love which involved my other sex friendships.

I have no doubt, that Sarah and Lindsey have experienced some of those “too good to be true” moments in their own friendship. The cultural Freudian narrative would believe Sarah and Lindsey could not experience such depth in their relationship sans sex. However, if you view their friendship through the lens of an Eucharistic intimacy, there is no ceiling on spiritual beauty in their relationship.

I continue to nurture a deep attraction toward my wife and to this day, I find her more beautiful than ever. I also continue to nurture a deep attraction toward my female friend. We have been close friends for twelve years. I had made several decisions back while I was “staying with” my attraction in a contemplative posture in my practice of the Eucharist. I took responsibility for my own actions and refused to ever act on any sexual feelings or any erotic energy I was experiencing in my friendship. I refused to fantasize. I also stayed clear of any pornographic material. I continued to nurture my attraction and love toward Sheila.

It just so happened somewhere about nine years ago that as I was experiencing the sweet and delightful love of Christ in the Eucharist and my growing delight and attraction toward my female friend, I encountered the gift of sexuality and friendship. Instead of running away from it, ignoring it, or seeking sex, I chose to nurture something deeper: a social desire for an alternative intimacy in friendship which did not neuter my sexuality. This didn’t happen overnight. But I continued to seek Christ, engage in conversation with trusted others, and eagerly search for wisdom on a wide range of issues pertaining to sexuality and friendship.

I now have a wide range of friendships. I view nurturing a deep attraction with my other sex friends as an intentional practice for being authentic in my sexuality and being authentic as a trusted and safe friend. “True desire,” writes Philip Sheldrake in his rich book, Befriending Our Desires, “is non-possessive. It is an openness to the future, to possibility, to ‘the other’ whether human other or God.” Nurturing a deep attraction is to choose the path of Eucharistic intimacy: to learn to receive, to learn to be open, to learn attentiveness to real presence, to forgive and seek forgiveness, to let go, and to attend to delight and beauty in our deepest relationships. It is too good to be true. But this is the trajectory of the Christian faith. To find the greatest treasure in the world—Christ in our relationships.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Speaking of Sexual Trauma

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A reflection by Sarah

It’s never easy to talk about sexual trauma. No matter how often a related story appears within national, international, and local media, no matter what we’ve learned from child protection trainings, no matter how regularly we’re exposed to it in a culture saturated with sexually-charged messages, this is a topic that makes almost everyone uncomfortable. And that’s because most people haven’t the foggiest clue how to talk about it. I’ve been broaching the subject for years within my own circle of friends, slowly challenging my comfort zone, including more people in the discussion, and I still don’t know the best way to talk about it…especially within the context of LGBT issues.

Where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, people didn’t talk about sex. It wasn’t considered appropriate for polite conversation. I came into puberty knowing virtually nothing about sexuality, and most of my peers weren’t much better off. And I’d venture a guess that almost no one–not even our parents–had any idea how to recognize the signs of sexual abuse. I was taught that sex offenders are suspicious, shadowy figures who lie in wait for children who wander away from their parents, that “good” people–especially those who are active in the local community and church–can never be predators, and that old men can’t be held accountable for sexual touching because they might be senile so their actions don’t count as abuse. My parents brought me up to believe that once I entered puberty, it was my responsibility to watch out for men who weren’t able to keep their hands to themselves. I simply had to understand that most of these men weren’t raised properly and might not be able to handle seeing a pretty girl who was beginning to develop at a younger age than average. If a man was a close friend of my parents, he certainly didn’t fall into this group. Any suggestion that such a person might be unsafe was categorically unbelievable. And most of all, if anything ever happened to me, I was never to tell a soul other than my parents–who would be the sole determiners of whether I was telling the truth–for fear of making waves in the community and gaining a reputation as a loose young woman. I was 23 years old and nearly overcome by PTSD before learning that everything I thought I knew about sexual abuse was a falsehood.

Central Appalachia is not the only area where such things happen, and I am not the only woman who has had such an experience. More to the point of today’s post, I’m not the only lesbian or the only member of the LGBT community who has survived sexual trauma. Yet we can’t seem to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t sound nice. It could be used to discredit LGBT people. The discussion could be used to discredit liberals, or conservatives, or feminists, or anti-feminists, or affirmers, or non-affirmers. So on rare occasions when we do discuss LGBT survivors of sexual trauma, we’re good at building agenda-driven walls around the ways people are permitted to share their stories.

Yesterday morning, I was rereading our review of The Third Way. Specifically, I was reflecting on the story of sexual abuse shared by Julie, one of the documentary’s interviewees. Julie claims that her lesbian sexual orientation is linked to the fact that she endured sexual trauma as a young girl. She makes clear that after being abused, she began to view men as perpetrators and wanted nothing more to do with them. In our review, Lindsey and I discussed Julie’s story as one example of the film’s ex-gay undertones, and we stand by our criticism that overall, The Third Way privileges an ex-gay narrative while ignoring the diversity of celibate LGBT experiences. But regardless of the documentary’s shortcomings in piecing together a more comprehensive metanarrative, as an individual, Julie has a right tell to her own story as she understands it. She has lived it, and it would be absolutely unjust for me to say that I know it better than she does. It would also be unjust for another person to force me, or any other survivor, into Julie’s framework for understanding possible intersections of sexual orientation and trauma.

Speaking of sexual trauma as an LGBT person requires walking on eggshells. Our stories have political capital, whether we want them to or not. In my experience, the broader LGBT community expects survivors to defend the idea that sexual abuse rarely, if ever, is a determining factor in one’s sexual orientation. On the other extreme, most of the conservative Christian community is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that if an LGBT person was sexually abused at some point in life, surely that must be the cause of his or her sexual orientation.

A survivor with a story like Julie’s will inevitably face the criticism, “Your story is harmful to all other survivors in the LGBT community! Studies show that there are just as many straight women as lesbians who have histories of sexual trauma.” A survivor who is confident that his/her sexual trauma was not a causal factor for sexual orientation will face the opposite criticism: “You’re in denial. Prove that the abuse is unrelated to your orientation. Until there’s proof that sexual trauma never impacts sexual orientation, your story isn’t worth discussing.” Those of us who have chosen celibacy are accustomed to getting blasted equally from both sides, with conservative friends arguing that the trauma caused our gayness and liberal friends assuming that the trauma is our reason for being celibate. Not to mention that on top of these stigmas, we face all the same stereotypes and judgments (i.e. attention-seeking, it didn’t really happen if the perpetrator didn’t go to jail, we’re at fault) as do straight survivors.

Speaking of sexual trauma should not have to be re-traumatizing. Nor should it have to be like a multiple choice exam where you get 100% for bubbling in all the correct answers. I have no interest in being someone’s political pawn, whether inside or outside the Church. But I’m very interested in beginning a conversation about sexual trauma that invites all LGBT survivors to full participation. If you believe your sexual trauma is totally unrelated to your sexual orientation, if you see those two life experiences as completely intertwined, if you think the two might be related but you aren’t sure how and would like to explore further, or if you’ve never even considered the question before, we’d be honored if you felt safe to share more of your story with us.

It’s time for others to stop using narratives of sexual trauma in an effort to discredit LGBT survivors; it’s time for others to start listening to survivors telling their own stories. The last thing an LGBT survivor needs is to walk on more eggshells. The constant politicization of narratives regarding sexual abuse means that any LGBT survivor who opens up at all about his or her own story faces a loaded cannon of criticism. This post is our initial attempt at saying we’d like to change the tenor of the conversation. We’d like to foster a hospitable place here at A Queer Calling where survivors can know that all stories will be heard.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Saturday Symposium: What is Persecution, Anyway?

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Hello, Readers. Happy Saturday! It seems that summer has definitely arrived. We’re grateful to everyone who has contacted us. We are going to be spending some time today trying to catch up on email since we have received a lot of email that requires us to author our responses while sitting in the same room.

Now it’s time for today’s Saturday Symposium question:

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week’s question is an invitation for you all to get involved with our What Persecution Is series that we’re authoring with Jake Dockter. As Jake explained in his initial post, the series has been motivated by public figures who claim to have been persecuted for their Christian beliefs. In our first post of the series, we explored how silencing could be regarded as the beginning of persecution. Today, we’d love to hear your thoughts: What is persecution anyway? What are important topics to raise when we’re talking about persecution? Do you know of stories of persecution that are getting overlooked by other outlets? Are you interested in contributing anything to the series?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.