(PDF version available here)
EC’s 2018 ConnECtion will come together over June 1 – 3, 2018 up on the mountain at Kirkridge, where our eastern ConnECtion has met each summer since 1980.
Registration can be done online on the first page at www.ecinc.org
And, here’s a complete list of all of EC’s summer ConnECtions – eastern, mid-western and western – from 1980 through 2018 – with the names of all of our guest keynoters. Ralph Blair keynoted all of the ConnECtions. Does this list bring back some memories?
| 1980 East: | Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, James S. Tinney. Midwest: Val Clear, Letha Dawson Scanzoni. West: Rosalind Rinker, Phyllis Hart. |
| 1981 East: | Nancy Hardesty, Mark Olson. West: Howard Rice, Jan Evans. |
| 1982 East: | Rosalind Rinker, Gerald T. Sheppard. West: Jane R. Dickie, Ken Medema. |
| 1983 East: | Virginia West Davidson, Douglas J. Miller. Midwest: Rosalind Rinker had to cancel due to a hip injury, so only Blair keynoted. West: Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Clark Barshinger. |
| 1984 East: | Walden Howard, Phyllis Hart. West: Nancy Hardesty, Stanley Rock. |
| 1985 East: | Ken Medema, Ann Quick. Midwest: Ralph Blair. West: Letha Dawson Scanzoni, John F. Alexander. |
| 1986 East: | John F. Alexander, Jane R. Dickie. Midwest: Mary Franzen Clark, Thomas R. Clark. West: J. Harold Ellens, Marsha Stevens. |
| 1987 East: | Jeanne Hanson, J. Harold Ellens. Midwest: Marsha Stevens, Stanley Rock. West: Anne Eggebroten, Mark Olson. |
| 1988 East: | Ken Van Wyk, Marsha Stevens. Midwest: Phyllis Hart, J. Harold Ellens. West: Jeanne Hanson, Gerald T. Sheppard. |
| 1989 East: | Mildred Pearson, John Linscheid. Midwest: Jeanne Hanson, Marchiene Rienstra. West: Mary Franzen Clark, Mel White. |
| 1990 East: | Marchiene Rienstra, Stan Rock. West: Michael Bussee & Gary Cooper, Beverly Barbo. |
| 1991 East: | Mel White, Ruth Rus. West: Ron Drummond, Joan Olson. |
| 1992 East: | Nick Warner, Joan Olson. West: Kathryn Lindskoog, Douglas J. Miller. |
| 1993 East: | Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peggy Campolo. West: Mahan Silar, Patricia V. Long. |
| 1994 East: | Hendrik Hart, Pamela Warrick-Smith. West: Mel White, Peggy Campolo. |
| 1995 East: | Lewis B. Smedes, Chip & Nancy Miller. West: Michael J. Christensen, Pamela Warwick-Smith. |
| 1996 East: | Michael J. Christensen, Letha Dawson Scanzoni. West: June Steffenson Hagen, Chip & Nancy Miller. |
| 1997 East: | Charlie Shedd, June Steffensen Hagen. West: Donald W. Dayton, Marchiene Rienstra. |
| 1998 East: | Tom Key, Caroline J. Simon. West: Charlie Shedd, Mary V. Borhek. |
| 1999 East: | Ken Sehested, Nancy Hastings Sehested. West: Lewis B. Smedes, Kathy Olsen. |
| 2000 East: | R. Maurice Boyd, Mary V. Borhek. West: Mary Kay Beall, Jim Lucas. |
| 2001 East: | Jeff Ford, Melanie Parks Beachy. West: Mary Lou Wallner, Nelson Gonzalez. |
| 2002 East: | Roy Clements, Patricia Burgin. West: Roy Clements, Deanna Jaworski. |
| 2003 East: | Jeremy Marks, Kathy Olsen. West: Patricia Burgin, Alex Haiken. |
| 2004 East: | Randall Balmer, Ptah Brown. West: Jeremy Marks, Darlene Franklin. |
| 2005 East: | Reta Halteman Finger, Walt Hearn. West: Justin Lee, Roberta Showalter Kreider. |
| 2006 East: | Cynthia Clawson, David G. Myers. West: David G. Myers, Ann Phillips, Cynthia Clawson. |
| 2007 East: | Ann Phillips, Justin Lee. West: Jack Rogers, Reta Halteman Finger. |
| 2008 East: | Kirk Talley, Diana McLean. West: Randall Balmer, Evelyn Schave, Kirk Talley. |
| 2009 East: | Miguel de la Torre, Stephanie Sandberg. West: Stacey Latimer, Elise Elrod. |
| 2010 East: | Fisher Humphreys, Theresa D. McClellan. West: Chuck Smith, Jr., Sandy Turnbull. |
| 2011 East: | Jenny Morgan, Ling Lam. West: Kori Ashton, Gerald Palmer. |
| 2012 East: | Kori Ashton, Steve Slagg. |
| 2013 East: | Shari Johnson, Jared Porter. |
| 2014 East: | Jim Rayburn III, Amy Plantinga Pauw. |
| 2015 East: | James V. Brownson, Carol Anne Vaughn Cross. |
| 2016 East: | Abigail Santamaria, Tony Campolo. |
| 2017 East: | Todd Komarnicki, Jane Bradbury. |
| 2018 East: | Matt Carden, Holly Chaisson. |
EC’s 2018 Columbus Day Weekend in Ocean Grove will honor the 100th anniversaries of the births of Billy Graham, the 20th Century’s greatest evangelist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet prisoner and lucid critic of Marxism, and Gardner C. Taylor, civil rights leader and longtime preacher at Brooklyn’s great Concord Baptist Church. Besides learning of their lives and seeing a display of personal artifacts from those lives, we’ll hear three sermons, each on a biblical theme related to the callings of their lives. The weekend runs from supper on Friday, October 5th through lunch on Sunday, the 6th.
Talking Across the Divide is Justin Lee’s new book. It’s coming out in August from Penguin Random House, but can be pre-ordered from Barnes & Noble, Walmart, et al.
On his website, www.geekyjustin.com, he says this to preview his new book: “Every day, our world seems to get more polarized. There are people on the news, at work, or even in our own families whose views seem so bizarre to us that we just can’t imagine what on earth they could be thinking. We want to change their minds. We just have no idea how to get through to them. … In my 20 years speaking to both liberal and conservative groups, I’ve seen certain patterns repeat themselves again and again. I know what’s tearing us apart, and I’ve seen which strategies do or don’t work to get people on the other side of an issue to listen.”
Lately, Lee has been speaking in California and North Carolina and he’ll be back in California on May 19-21, at Spark Church in Palo Alto, and in Dallas, October 4-7, at the CenterPeace Conference.
HU Queer Press 2.0 was distributed on Harding University’s campus in April. Harding, in Searcy, Arkansas, is a college within the very conservative, even Fundamentalist, network of the Churches of Christ. It’s been 7 years since issue 1.0 was published and blocked. The anonymous students behind HUQP 2.0 state that they “have one simple mission in mind: to let people know that we exist. We are your friends, your classmates, your chapel buddies, your club brothers and sisters. … We have more in common with each other than you might think. We are all at Harding, we all belong here.”
The authors’ note: “We sing ‘Just as I Am’ in chapel, but we aren’t accepted just as we are. We’re accepted just as you want us to be.” Although public safety officers tried to toss away as many copies of the publication they could find, at least one responding faculty member messaged support. He tweeted: “To my LGBTQ+ students: I hear you, and I love you. You have the right to exist and God loves you. You are always welcome in my classroom and my office.”
Lesbian and gay college students for whom religion is very important are 38 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts than heterosexuals. Religiosity is, however, protective against suicidal thoughts in heterosexual college students. A study team at the Injury Control Research Center at West Virginia University came to these conclusions after analyzing survey data gathered by the University of Texas’ Research Consortium on 21,247 18-30 year old college students.
Gay on God’s Campus is a new book about LGBT equality on Christian campuses. It’s written by sociologist Jonathan Coley, who got his undergraduate degree at Samford, a Southern Baptist school and is now a sociology professor at Monmouth University.
In a recent Inside Higher Ed interview, Coley was asked: “Do you think more gay students will opt not to attend Christian colleges in the future?” Coley answered: “If anything, I expect the opposite. LGBT students attend Christian colleges and universities for many of the same reasons that their straight peers do. Many LGBT students are deeply religious and seek to attend a school where they can grow in their faith at the same time that they earn a degree. Other LGBT students, secular and religious alike, attend these schools because they are the best schools to which they were admitted, because these schools offered them the most financial aid, because these schools are located in an exciting city and/or because their parents encouraged them to attend these schools. Finally, some LGBT students attend Christian colleges and universities because more and more of these schools are becoming LGBT friendly. In fact, the majority of Christian colleges and universities now have nondiscrimination policies inclusive of sexual orientation.”
NPR reports that LGBT students at Christian colleges are “increasingly likely to be open about their own sexual orientation or gender identity.” NPR illustrates with a Calvin College student’s experience: “Sam Koster, who identifies as queer, finds fellow students to be generally tolerant. ‘People I’ve met in the English Department,’ Koster says, ‘even in my dorms, they’re like, “Oh, you’re queer? OK, cool. Do you want to go get pizza?”’” NPR notes, however, that conservative Christian schools are stuck between official positions on these issues within the school’s denominational alliance and Title IX of rules from the Federal Government as well as the personal beliefs of faculty members and administrators.
“California state authorities are hijacking good-faith concerns about reparative therapy.” So says Jeff Myers, head of the antigay Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs, Colorado. In his efforts to keep pushing the long-discredited “ex-gay” promises that virtually all previous advocates have now renounced with sincere apologies and deep remorse for the damage their so-called “therapy” produced, Myers twists the California issue into a matter of legislators, “denying constitutional protection to those who hold traditional views of sexuality and marriage.” Myers claims that his staff is made up of “leading Christian experts who base their presentations on theology as well as sociology, psychology and science.” But, his staff’s “expertise” flies in the face of the positions of an increasing number of leading evangelical biblical scholars and theologians as well as the clear consensus in sociology, psychology and the mental health professions.
Myers used to teach undergraduate and MBA students at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. In 2011, he succeeded Summit Ministries’ founder and first president, David Noebel, a protégé of Billy James Hargis, who’d left the Hargis’ ministries after Hargis was accused of homosexuality with students at his American Christian College, which he’d founded in Tulsa.
Today’s California’s Business and Professions Code is simply being upgraded to protect the unwary from further deceptive promises to “repair” homosexual orientation. But, Myers claims, “The wording of [the bill, AB-2943] is a dog whistle to the left that intelligent Christians holding traditional views are fair game for discrimination, smears and frivolous lawsuits.”
“I decided the gay label and lifestyle didn’t align to my desired identity as a Christian”, says Daren Mehl, who’s now married to a woman. Mehl explains: “Jesus asked me to lay down my identity at his feet and surrender it for a new one in Him.” He admits: “Trying to align my choices in behavior to my Christian identity took years of struggling, and sometimes it was quite painful”, but he says that his “identity” now is, “heterosexual”.
Mehle and others who believe that acting on same-sex attraction is wrong, met at the outdoor stage of D.C.’s National Sylvan Theater on May 5th to support each other. They included a formerly homeless drug addicted woman, another woman who says she, “lived and practiced a gay lifestyle” for over 30 years, a man who used to be very promiscuous, homosexually, was there with his wife who’d once lived as a lesbian. And one man who survived the horrible mass murder at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub also attended.
Throughout their three hours of praise, prayer and testimonies, the terminology was that of “labels” and “identity” and not the old “ex-gay” vocabulary of “orientation” change. Afterwards, they made a 20-minute “Freedom March” to The White House.
“It is very possible that sexual minorities benefit from animosity aimed towards conservative Christians.” This is the observation of sociologist George Yancey at the University of North Texas. From his research on Christianophobia, along with his study of attitudes toward sexual minorities (gays or transgendered), he thinks that, “it’s more than sympathy towards sexual minorities that is shaping support for them. In addition to that sympathy, hostility towards conservative Christians also seems to matter and it matters even when I controlled for how much the respondents like sexual minorities.” His research indicates that, “even among those who do not particularly like sexual minorities, they are more likely to support their rights if they do not like conservative Christians.” He argues that, “movement away from a ‘live and let live’ perspective makes perfect sense if a significant portion of support for sexual minorities is tied to an antipathy towards conservative Christians. This antipathy can lead some individuals to look towards using the new freedoms granted towards sexual minorities to punish conservative Christians.”
President Trump’s openly gay nominee for the crucial post of U.S. Ambassador to Germany finally has been approved. Nominated last September, Richard Grenell had to endure months of the Democrats’ foot dragging. And there was virtually no support from LGBT groups, though Grenell’s been a very strong advocate for same-sex marriage rights. The Senate, by a vote of 56 to 42, finally confirmed him. He’d already served four U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. and had worked in National Security. He is a graduate of Evangelical University and the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“He has now officially become the highest ranking openly gay official ever in a Republican administration,” says Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo.
Angelo pointed out that, “despite the interminable delays of Democrats hell-bent on standing on the wrong side of history, today the United States Senate confirmed a gay nominee not ‘in spite of’ Republicans, or ‘with Republican support,’ but because of Republican support.”
At Grenell’s swearing-in ceremony, Vice-President Pence welcomed him warmly: “Ric, you were confirmed to this post exactly one week ago, and you already hit the ground running. Those of you may have noticed that on his first day in the job, he joined President Trump and myself to welcome German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the White House for discussions on strengthening the historic partnership between our two nations.”
Syracuse University has expelled its Theta Tau fraternity for producing an “appalling and disgusting” video. That’s how the school’s Chancellor described what the fraternity claimed was a “satirical sketch of an uneducated, racist, homophobic, misogynist, sexist, ableist and intolerant person.”
United Lutheran Seminary hired and quickly fired its new president over her past involvement with an “ex-gay” program, though she’d disavowed that ministry some two decades ago. A lesbian seminary student claimed that she was “devastated” by news of the new president’s past. That the president already had renounced that work long ago, made absolutely no difference to the angry lesbian activist. United Lutheran Seminary is affiliated with ELCA, the liberal Lutherans.
The Catholic Church in Trinidad and Tobago supports legalizing homosexuality. A High Court decision paves the way for making homosexuality legal there. It has been a criminal offense with a prison sentence of 25 years.
eTurboNews warns LGBT tourists to be very careful in they’re planning travel to countries where they’re considered criminals. The warning applies to traveling across much of the Caribbean, and in most of Africa, Western and Central Asia.
First Baptist Church in Fairmont, West Virginia is voted out of the local American Baptist Fellowship. The reason: the local congregation and pastor Valarie Gittings, a graduate of Eastern University’s Palmer Seminary, support same-sex couples and the West Virginia Baptist Convention, with its 371 churches, does not. First Baptist is now seeking alternate affiliation in another of its mainline regional associations of American Baptists.
“Why do ‘progressive’ comedians so readily jump to homophobic jokes when it comes to mocking conservatives?” Ira Madison III, a writer at The Beast, founded by the liberal Tina Brown of Newsweek, raised this question in response to comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s antigay mocking of President Trump and Fox commentator, Sean Hannity. Madison also took note of comedian Chelsea Handler’s antigay tweet, “Jeff Sessions is definitely a bottom.” Madison observed that these “progressives” were aiming for laughs by way of antigay jokes and that such “is the surefire way to knock someone down a peg. Because insisting that they’re gay must be the ultimate insult, right? Because the insinuation that a man might want to have sex with another man is somehow funny. The act itself is comical.” Madison notes, “They’re not the first liberal comedians to resort to such cheap jokes. Just think of last year, when Stephen Colbert used homophobic jokes to attack President Trump on The Late Show”, using lines about Trump’s mouth and Putin’s penis – although more vulgar terms were used by Colbert. Madison concludes: “Once again, the idea of a man engaging in a sexual act with another man is seen as funny. It’s the worst way to insult a straight man: implying that he might be gay.”
Bob Dylan flips gender pronouns in “Universal Love”, a new EP released in salute to the LGBTQ community. He sings the Billie Holiday hit, “He’s Funny That Way”. “I’m not much to look at, nothin’ to see / Just glad I’m livin’ and happy to be / I got a man, crazy for me / He’s funny that way.” Other artists on this release, including St. Vincent, Kesha and Valerie June. They do the same gender flips on lyrics of popular songs.
“Incels” are in the news lately. They’re “a movement” of jealously angry, sometimes violent, “involuntary celibates”. The Canadian who rammed his van down a street full of people, killing 10 and injuring 15, had proclaimed on Facebook, he’s one of them. He was imitating another “incel” who murdered six and wounded 13 in California in 2014.
“Incels” foolishly envy those they disdain as the “Chads and Stacys” who find it easy to “get laid”. Ross Douthat at The New York Times locates “incels” within a culture that’s bought into the “Hefnerian” take on sex. But, as he observes, that narrow model stereotypically excludes “the overweight and disabled, minority groups treated as unattractive in the majority, trans women unable to find partners” and others. Douthat suggests a more constructive, conservative understanding of the human sexual need.
The BMJ (British Medical Journal) cautions that, since transgender people need lifelong hormonal treatment, side effects are venous thrombosis in trans women due to oestrogens and polycythaemia caused by androgens in trans men. Since some trans women will not have had their prostrate removed and some trans men keep their ovaries, there’s risk of cancer in these sites.
Also alarming is the fact that, in a British psychiatric examination of 100 other studies, it was found that transgender patients experienced regret in 20 percent of cases of post-SRS [sex reassignment surgery], 41 percent attempted suicide, 90 percent had a “significant form of psychopathology”, 61 percent had other psychiatric disorders and illnesses, 50 percent had depressive symptoms, and 40 percent had symptoms of anxiety.
From Sweden, the most thorough follow-up studies of transgender patients, conducted over the course of thirty years, have found that, 10 to 15 years after sex change surgery, study participants have a suicide rate nearly 20 times that of comparable peers and are at considerably higher risks for psychiatric morbidity than the general population.
These continuing findings confirm what pioneering endocrinologists and psychiatrists saw with those they treated as “transsexuals” in those earlier years. Their observations and conclusions back then continue to be true. But, given today’s political implications of saying so, few are courageous enough to take professional risks to be candid.
Taylor Fogarty tweets as “the loud lesbian” and writes in The Federalist, a webzine of conservative/libertarian opinion. She recently reported on the increasing detransitioning among trans folks. Even after surgery and hormone therapy, trans folks are ten times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. And, as noted in the Record (Spring, 2018) on this singularly patient-diagnosed, patient-prescribing condition, most people today don’t know that endocrinologists, psychiatrists, sexologists and even sexual rights advocates who’d pioneered what, in the early 1970s, was called ‘transsexual’, came to the conclusion that those who said they were “trapped in the wrong body” were deeply unhappy but were not helped by cosmetic surgery or cross-sex hormone injections. Transgender Subjectivities: A Clinician’s Guide, edited by gay psychiatrists Jack Drescher and Ubaldo Leli and co-published by the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy is a useful professional source of clinical papers for a broader understanding of the issues.
Fogarty shares accounts of the “de-transitioning” phenomenon. One says that he, “misunderstood what a ‘woman’ was … that my failure to be accepted as a man was because I was really a woman.” On his first visit to a San Francisco community health clinic, he was prescribed male-to-female hormones and told, “not to worry”. After extensive genital surgery his unhappiness only increased and he became suicidal: “I seem to be either a desexed monstrosity, or I’m a damaged, mutilated male. I’ve been alone a long time. I’ve been forced into celibacy. I yearn for mere conversation and cuddling.” Fogarty cites another struggling to de-transition: “I wish I had been challenged by a doctor. Our physical bodies, with genitalia and chromosomes, exist in reality, and part of having a body is hating your body. You are taught to hate your body no matter who you are, male or female, and you are falling for it.” Fogarty critiques gender reassignment’s being thought “the Holy Grail for those struggling with their sex. When the potentially fatal outcomes are not adequately tracked, however, shouldn’t honesty be the priority when speaking about the lifelong effects of the transition process?”
Transgender prison inmates may choose to be housed on the basis of their claimed gender identity in New York City’s jails. The new policy follows San Francisco’s. NYC’s Department of Correction has until October 13 to implement the new policy.
The Iranian national women’s soccer team has 8 transgender men on the team. Iran has the death penalty for homosexuality, but permits sex change operations. It’s claimed that the men on the team are awaiting transgender surgery. Meanwhile, the Iranian soccer team is accused of having an unethical advantage with these physically stronger men on the team. All of the team’s players wear hijab headscarves, long-sleeved tops and tracksuit bottoms.
She’s “the most modified transgender person in the world”. She’s spent over $50,000 for body modifications and with no end of it in sight. This former bank vice-president wants to be a dragon. When this man who’s now “Eva” was diagnosed with HIV, he didn’t want to die, “looking like as a human”. So, “I’m introducing the idea of trans-speciesism. I have two mothers: one is my original birth mother and my second birth is to my reptilian parents, which are the rattlesnakes.”
AND FINALLY
“Chick-Fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City”. That’s the recent virtue signaling title of an article in The New Yorker. The writer is apoplectic over Chick-Fil-A’s opening on Fulton Street in Manhattan. See, Chick-Fil-A isn’t chic. But more to the point, it’s owned and run by evangelical Christians and at its Atlanta headquarters, there’s a statue of Jesus. The angry New Yorker writer later tweets to his fans: “Welp time to sit down with a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich and a cold one and read more mentions.” He doesn’t realize that Wendy’s was founded by yet another of those “deplorable” evangelical Christians. When he finds out, might he write, “Welp time to get some KFC”? Darn! The Colonel, too, loved Jesus.