Bearing Witness

Gacked from a comment thread at Making Light -- a liberal Christian blogs about his experience as one of the counter-demonstraters at Chicago Pride.

I hugged a man in his underwear. I think Jesus would have too.

I spent the day at Chicago’s Pride Parade. Some friends and I, with The Marin Foundation, wore shirts with “I’m Sorry” written on it. We had signs that said, “I’m sorry that Christians judge you,” “I’m sorry the way churches have treated you,” “I used to be a bible-banging homophobe, sorry.” We wanted to be an alternative Christian voice from the protestors that were there speaking hate into megaphones.

Full post at I Hugged a Man in His Underwear. And I am Proud.

Semyaza posted an interesting link on BearingWitness_LJ this morning. The post linked to is good, but the host blog looks of interest as well. Since I have paid accounts, I've created LJ and DW feeds of the blog itself and its comment feed, if anyone wants to add them to their flist:

Original RSS feed: http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/index.xml
Feed to LJ: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/thinkinganglica/
Feed to DW: http://thinkinganglicans-feed.dreamwidth.org/

And the comments feed:
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/comments.xml
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/tangliccomments/
http://th-angl-comment-feed.dreamwidth.org/

John Scalzi's blog, the Whatever, is one of my regular reads. John Scalzi talks about all sorts of stuff, but there are a couple of posts he's made which touch upon the subject matter of this comm. John himself is an agnostic who believes that Jesus was a real person but not divine, and he has a lot of time for what Jesus had to say about how to treat your fellow humans. And not much time for people who read the Bible looking for excuses to hate.

An old post, about cherry-picking Leviticus:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/002675.html
More, with bumper stickers:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003530.html
And something about being glad to be reminded that there are plenty of Christians who don't:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/10/reaffirming-christianity/

And a recent post:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/03/22/reader-request-week-2010-1-christianity-and-me/

A warning for anyone not familiar with the blog who likes these enough to wander off and look at other posts -- John's posting style tends to the in-your-face.

Here's writer Paul Cornell back in February on the subject of you don't have to be homophobic to be Christian. I'd heard him touch on this at the Redemption con last year, but this is a full-on declaration of intent. In this post he suggests a twittertag:

"In the meantime, I've started a hashtag on Twitter: #godlyforequality. If you're on Twitter, go and have a look, and let's see if we can retweet the message a long way. It's only a tiny thing. It's the least I can do."

A good thought, and one I intend to follow when tweeting about appropriate Bearing Witness posts.

Things I believe by Teresa Nielson Hayden, a meditation on the Nicene Creed for Easter 2004. To give you an idea of the flavour: "I believe in the God of the Burgess Shale, Who not only made creation stranger than we know, but stranger than we could ever imagine." Read the comments thread as well. I particularly commend to you comment #27.

The Slacktivist blog by Fred Clark discusses religion from a liberal Christian perspective. It's particularly notable for the ongoing dissection of the theology in the Left Behind books, by someone with heavyweight theology training.

The Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic has a joking title, but a serious mission. While the discussion on the site is from an explicitly agnostic viewpoint and occasionally forgets that not all Christians are fundamentalists, they have much material on over-literal or selective use of the Bible that will be of interest to liberal Christians.