Mark’s pericope of the anointing woman (Mark 14:3-9) provides a poignant model of cisgender allyship to the transgender community. The anointing woman shows extravagant care to Jesus as a demonstration of the value of his body and as an acknowledgment of the painful transition he is about to endure. Jesus’
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Picture it: Rainbows. Everywhere. Rainbow balloons. Rainbow t-shirts. Rainbow flags. Rainbow signs. You feel the heavy humid air and smell the rainclouds preparing to unleash on the protest, yet there is joy and excitement filling the streets. It was Saturday, June 29th, 2019—Manila’s Pride Parade, and the LGBTQ community of
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I spent the summer of 1994 being trained as a chaplain at the largest Level I trauma hospital in Atlanta. I was twenty-three when I began the program. At that point I had only peripherally met one person who I knew was HIV-positive, and I questioned if my life experience
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I know you; you’re an ally. You read the books, you listen to the podcasts, and you wear the pins. I get it. (Here’s a secret — I have all the pins, too.) Recently, I was quarantine cooking and listening to the Queerology podcast, “On Performative Allyship and Black Joy,”
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This is a personal story about what it means to be part of a movement to change the attitudes of a denomination and our nation, particularly on matters of women’s rights and human sexuality. I write to encourage people to consider serving on national committees, and to encourage the church
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When I first came out of the closet ten years ago, I didn’t think of it as a political act or as an act of bravery or as an act of defiance. For me, I came out because I was tired of living a lie. I knew that I could
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The Nashville LGBT Chamber of Commerce is a business chamber dedicated to the LGBT community and advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights in the work place along with other queer advocacy platforms. At the beginning of September, the Nashville LGBT Chamber of Commerce decided to allow CoreCivic into its chamber and accepted
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From its creation in 1968, The United Methodist Church has struggled to hold traditional interpretations of biblical sexuality with a theology of an inclusive and grace-filled God. In the Book of Discipline, the guiding organizational document for the UMC, we state that sexuality is “God’s good gift to all persons” and
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In social justice and in Sunday school, we need to pay more attention to the lessons we can learn from kids. When I joined a volunteer committee to rework my church’s Sunday school policies, I was reminded of the recent Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex. The
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In May 2016, the church I served hosted Garrard Conley for a reading from his book Boy Erased. A week before the reading, I got the call from my colleague at the book store. She wanted to review details for the event in light of a conversation she had with
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