Denial of Baptism in the 21st century to a baby with two Dads? No, just a postponement .....

In last Sunday's sacred text, St. Peter asks: "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" And the answer in one Florida cathedral seemed to be: "Yeah, we can imagine denying baptism to a beautiful baby boy just because he has two Dads." Then the Bishop stepped in and met with the Dads, after which it appears the baby will be baptized shortly. 

Just as the story started to die down, a canon at the now infamous cathedral preached: "the scandal is how the real story was highjacked by social media activists on the West Coast." As the President of Oasis California, I am please that my online work and letter to the bishop did not go unappreciated. Now I am working up to becoming recognized as an "outside agitator" for diversity.

Fr. Tom Jackson 

New Suicide Hotline Dedicated to Trans People Now Open for Calls

San Francisco-based Trans Lifeline has collected an all-trans staff of volunteers who aim to make the crisis hotline experience more comfortable and accessible for trans callers. More

Yes, There Are A Lot More Gay Christians Than You Probably Think

While the number of Christians in America has dropped substantially in just seven years, the number of gay Christians seems to have jumped dramatically. More

PEW CONFIRMS LGBT REJECTION OF RELIGION: WHY THAT’S A GOOD THING

"Pew researchers found that at least 41% could give a rip if the evangelical church welcomes them in their pews, because they’ve given up on religion anyway—at least that type of religion." More

Take a Selfie and Take a Stand

Eight out of 10 LGBT youth report being bullied, and you have an opportunity to support them. Download the Spirit Day app right now and take a selfie to take a stand!

The Spirit Day App, powered by Toyota Financial Services, provides you with anti-bullying resources, calls to action, and allows you take part in Spirit Day on October 16th, the largest and most visible anti-bullying campaign in the world in support of LGBT youth. The app is available now for Apple, Android, and Amazon devices.

DOWNLOAD NOW

This innovative and easy-to-use resource gives you the power to use your voice and help us show the world that bullying is something we just won't tolerate. And when you do, you'll join countless others who feel the same way.

       

Millions of Americans wear purple on Spirit Day as a sign of support for LGBT youth and to speak out against bullying. This app makes it easier to take part in Spirit Day, and to learn how you can support bullied youth. 

Queer God/Queer(ing) God at EYE14: “Boys are blue; girls are pink; no purpling!”

The No Purpling workshop

By Logan Rimel

 “Boys are blue; girls are pink; no purpling!”

This commonly used adage is heard by untold numbers of youth before church events and gatherings. The implications are clear: No sexual activity, but, you know, we don’t actually want to talk about that. At the Episcopal Youth Event 2014, three DioCal members presented a workshop entitled “No Purpling,” in order to offer youth the tools to examine both the assumptions underlying this cutesy expression, and the world around them more broadly. Along with my co-presenters Grace Aheron and Grace Wilkins, I was fortunate enough to engage with and be engaged by roughly 120 youth over the course of two 75-minute presentations. My presence at these workshops was only possible due to the generosity of Oasis, which invested in our work by sponsoring my ticket to Philadelphia.

To access the idea of normative perspectives, we began with the idea of lenses. You wouldn’t wear sunglasses in a dark room, right? Or your reading glasses to drive? Sometimes the lenses through which we see the world are only helpful in certain contexts, and sometimes they’re cracked and dirty and need to be updated. But we get used to the view lenses give us when we wear them on our faces all day. If we make a shift to the theoretical, lenses represent a set of assumptions, and we need a tool to help us pay attention to these assumptions. We introduced “queering” as this tool, and then invited the youth to engage with us in queering many of the stories and concepts we find around us.

When paying attention to our lenses, it quickly becomes clear that the phrase “no purpling” is built upon the assumptions of heterosexuality in a binary gender system. But because “queering” means to dissolve boundaries as well as to question assumptions, we took it a step further and made an outrageous claim: God is queer(ing), and is revealing this to us in Scripture and in our lived experiences. Dress-wearing Joseph of Egypt, God’s naming of Godself in Exodus, the destabilizing nature of the Trinity, and Jesus’ transgressive redefinition of the Sabbath all point us toward a God who firmly undoes our ideas of limitation and calls us into the fullness of our being.

Dean of Grace Cathedral to become Stanford's new dean for religious life

The Very Rev. Dr. Jane Shaw, dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, has been named dean for religious life at Stanford University, Provost John Etchemendy announced today. Shaw will also be joining the faculty in Stanford's Department of Religious Studies.

Shaw, a historian and theologian who is at present also a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, has served as dean of the Episcopal Grace Cathedral since 2010. She previously taught at the University of Oxford.

Shaw, 51, will succeed the Rev. William "Scotty" McLennan Jr., who is stepping down after 14 years. She will assume her position as Stanford's spiritual leader this fall.

At Stanford, Shaw will provide spiritual, religious and ethical leadership to the university community, serve as minister of Memorial Church and also teach undergraduates and graduate students as a professor of religious studies.

"We are lucky to have found in Jane Shaw both a charismatic leader and an accomplished academic to lead our Office for Religious Life," said Etchemendy. "Dean Shaw is equally committed to the educational mission of the university and the ecumenical mission of Memorial Church."

"I am delighted to be joining Stanford as dean for religious life," Shaw said. "The opportunity to serve at this extraordinary university is a great privilege. It will be my pleasure to work with so many wonderful colleagues and students to relate religious and ethical questions to the cutting-edge work being done at Stanford University, and to provide spiritual leadership for this exceptional academic community. I am also thrilled to be joining the excellent Religious Studies Department as a professor."