Happy Saturday! We’d like to extend a special welcome to our new readers and commenters. There has been an incredible amount of conversation this week! We hope that you’ve enjoyed the conversations as much as we have.
Pausing for a brief administrative moment, we wanted to let you know we’ve changed our comment settings so comments nest 5 deep. We made this decision because we wanted to improve readability. We’d encourage you to use the comment box at the end of the page should you find yourself lacking a Reply button on a particular comment.
It’s time for us to ask our 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, we have had many conversations about how the church welcomes gay people. Our most discussed post was our response to Fr. Dwight Longenecker. We especially appreciated this comment from Will Duquette, in which Will shares that his dominant experience of gay people comes from media reporting on activists working to shut down florists and bakeries. We wanted to open a conversation about how people experience words like gay, straight, LGBT, same-gender loving, homosexual, same-sex attracted, transgender, cisgender, and the gender binary. How can you have respectful conversations with a person who experiences these terms radically differently than you do? What strategies have you found helpful in bridging gaps in understanding? What kinds of things widen the gaps?
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.