Hello everyone! How is it August already? The summer is flying by. We’ve had some great conversations on the blog this week. Thanks so much for sharing your perspectives! We always welcome all commenters to our comment box.

Now let’s discuss our new 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 opened a conversation about parents and how they respond to their LGBT children. We’d love to hear more about relationships between LGBT children and their parents. If you’re LGBT, what factors do you consider as you contemplate sharing information about your sexual orientation and gender identity with your parents? If you are LGBT and out to your parents, how did your parents respond when you came out? Did you feel rejected, accepted, or somewhere in-between? What did your parents do well? What do you wish your parents had done differently? If you’re a parent of an LGBT child, what questions did you have before your son or daughter came out? How did you respond when your child came out to you? How has having an LGBT child affected your personal sexual ethic?

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.

Hello, folks! It’s been another great week here on the blog. Some of this week’s discussions have taken off in directions we never would have considered. We like being challenged, so keep it coming. Our retreat last weekend was a refreshing experience. Thanks to everyone who prayed for us.

Now let’s discuss our new 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: We’ve written before on the LGBTQ alphabet soup and why some people might prefer certain terms over others, and this week   Sarah wrote a personal reflection on the difficulty of defining LGBTQ terminology without undercutting the mysterious aspects of sexuality and gender. People have many different ways of determining what terminology suits them best, and we’re wondering what you think about choosing letters of the alphabet soup. Are there necessary “criteria” for identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer? For example, can a person who experiences romantic and emotional attraction to the same sex but not sexual attraction rightly consider himself/herself gay/lesbian? Does a person have to be interested in medical transition in order to identify as transgender? Is it even appropriate to attempt to qualify who is and who isn’t LGBTQ?

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.

Good morning, readers. By the time you see this post on Saturday morning, the two of us will be almost a full day into a weekend retreat with some of our dearest friends. Please pray for us during this time of much-needed spiritual rejuvenation. We’ll be (mostly) unplugged until Sunday evening, so it’s going to take us a bit of extra time to reply to all responses from last week’s surprisingly popular question. We’ve read them all and have spent the whole week reflecting. We’re eager to get back to you with our thoughts.

Even though we’re out of town and away from the internet for the weekend, we didn’t want to leave you without a new 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: “Why did you choose celibacy?” is probably the most predictable question we receive, both in real time and from blog readers. It seems almost everyone involved in the conversation about Christianity and the LGBT community has an opinion about celibacy, particularly the issue of why some LGBT people choose to become celibate. There are hundreds of reasons a person might choose a celibate way of life. In your opinion, are some of these reasons better than others? Are some more problematic than others? Do a person’s reasons for choosing celibacy matter? Do they matter more for LGBT people than for heterosexual, cisgender people who choose celibacy?

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.

Happy Saturday once again! We’ve managed to clear about half our inbox this past week, so we’re making it through those responses to reader emails. Each week, we continue to feel honored by readers who have shared their own thoughts and personal stories with us. The level of vulnerability you have shown challenges us to be more vulnerable. In particular, Sarah’s personal reflection from this week has received many incredibly moving responses. Thank you for flooding our inbox with love and entrusting us with your own stories.

Now, let’s move on to 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: Our question for today comes from a reader email. This reader has written to us with many thoughtful questions and comments, but we found one particularly striking. After reading multiple blogs within the LGBT Christian blogosphere, she recognizes a sense of privilege as a straight person and wants to be compassionate to all LGBT people while holding a traditional sexual ethic. She wonders how it is possible to continue bearing witness to a traditional sexual ethic if so many LGBT people have experienced despair and have even turned to suicide because of the beliefs associated with this approach to sexual ethics. We will be responding to this reader within the next few days, but because the issue raised in her email is a very important one (or at least should be, in our opinion) for all involved in the LGBT Christian conversation, we wanted to pose it for all our readers. How can a person bear witness to a traditional sexual ethic, even if that person believes it aligns with the Gospel, if doing so leads others to despair? Do you think it’s true that a traditional sexual ethic necessarily leads at least some LGBT people to a decrease in mental health and wellbeing? Are there any ways of discussing a traditional sexual ethic that might be less likely to have such an impact? Is a progressive sexual ethic the answer, or is it possible that a progressive sexual ethic might also do harm in some way? If so, to whom?

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.

Good morning, folks. Once again, hoping everyone’s weekend is off to a great start. If you’re one of our American readers, Happy 4th of July weekend. We’ve finally caught up on blog comments and are slowly responding to emails. As usual, thanks for your patience and for some very thoughtful comments this week.

We’re eager to hear your responses to 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: Because we don’t use the terms Side A and Side B here on the blog to describe our own sexual ethics, we’ve been wondering why some people place so much importance on these terms and others do not. As we were interacting with readers yesterday on Twitter, we decided to start a conversation about this.

We posed the question:

Are “Side A” and “Side B” the most accurate descriptors for all LGBT Christian sexual ethics? Thoughts?

— Lindsey and Sarah (@aqueercalling) July 4, 2014

Almost immediately, we heard from folks who recognize that the terms have utility and are helpful for some people. For example:  

@aqueercalling i think they have utility, but they don’t leave much space for nuance, which is important in dialogue

— ally clendineng (@redemptivehope) July 4, 2014

But others focused on how these terms can frame important conversations as a debate rather than a dialogue:

@aqueercalling I think they set it up to be a ‘debate’ when for most it is more nuanced than that. I don’t like the descriptors… — Charlotte Norton (@C_S_Norton) July 4, 2014

In the past, we’ve found these terms useful for exploring sexual ethics further. Even today, we still use them as shorthand in certain instances of conversation with friends. But if you’ve been reading our blog even for a short time, you’ve probably figured out that we believe there are other ways to discuss sexual ethics, and depending upon the conversation, trying a new approach to discussing LGBT issues in the Church might be necessary. Today, we are asking the same question we asked on Twitter yesterday: Are “Side A” and “Side B” the most accurate descriptors for all LGBT Christian sexual ethics? To put a bit more flesh on that question, if you were having coffee with someone who wanted a primer on this topic, would you feel it essential to first explain Side A and Side B, or would you take a different approach?

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.