The lamentable lack of official gayness at Gordon College was covered by the Hamilton Chronicle this week, and I hear a Boston Globe story may be coming…
All posts tagged Gordon College
La presse!
Ain’t easy being queer at Gordon College
Wrote a little post at Mind on Fire about a dustup at Gordon College over a LGBT support group that was voted down last week by student government.
The first thing that struck me was the way the article, glossing as a newspaper must over the hard theological issues, can only treat it as an emotional issue, tut-tutting the Student Association for not being more compassionate. The solution, one would suppose, would be for them to let their hearts grow a few sizes and hold a revote, and all would be well.
But it’s not that easy, because it’s not just about homophobia in the emotional sense, like it would be at most schools. It’s also about a millennia-old intellectual system that denigrates queerness (at least in most versions). And someone who give serious assent to that system with their head cannot accept queerness even if their heart wants to. (more…)
Posts on Mind on Fire
So in addition to the Leaving the Garden post, I’ll be covering for John the next few weeks at Mind on Fire by posting the next few Wednesdays.
Pending conversations with John, this Wednesday I’m planning to post about Greg Graffin’s talk and acoustic concert last night at the reception of the “Rushdie Award” given to him by Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.
And next week I may post about an event at my college this week: a retrospective about a perfect storm of LGBT activism that took place on campus a year ago. Unless something else turns up between now and then.
(Now that I’ve gotten audio working again on my computer (h/t Elisa!) I hope to have more to post about music soon…)
The holy or the broken hallelujah?
So David Bazan of Pedro the Lion fame played a show at Gordon College Thursday night, with Damien Jurado opening.
It was kind of perfect — a singer who has blurred the line between Christian and secular music, playing at one of the the more freethinking Christian colleges, for an audience of students and alumni who end up broadly agnostic at higher rates than you might expect. One of them asked during the Q&A, “Are you indifferent to or ambivalent about religion?” He said no, but made some non-propositional insinuations. And mentioned he was reading Bart Ehrman.
You could almost hear the faith (of a certain kind) being lost during the finale, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” –
(video from a previous show.)
His new CD has a song apparently about the breakup of Pedro the Lion and his new solo career, which at first seemed a little self-indulgent… but I quite like it now. (starts at 1:05)
