You Can, If You Want To: Navigating Christian Faith, Conscience and Matters LGBTQ+

Priest Alison (Jesus the Forgiving Victim) delivers an intermittently insightful argument for why loving Jesus means loving one’s “queer neighbors” as oneself. According to the author, Christianity has historically been wedded to linear, “two-dimensional” biblical narratives driven by a “top-down God” who blindly dictates rules. In reality, Alison explains, humans are designed to understand God’s wisdom with and through others, especially those who are marginalized or different from them; in humanizing “the scapegoated... among us,” one learns to humanize and love the scapegoated Jesus. In the author’s view, the process of eschewing moral righteousness and entering a “slow, penitent learning process by which we begin to apprehend reality” is central to becoming a true “disciple of God.” While the notion of faith as a process of co-creation is elegantly conceived and intriguing, Alison’s account is marred by meandering arguments and distracting metaphors (”Think of it as if Jesus had come into the world in order to produce the antibodies to immunize us against being run by death and its fear. In living into his death on the cross, he finally achieved the creation of the vaccine, and handed it over to his Father for distribution among all of us”). Still, patient and theologically minded readers will be rewarded. (Sept.)