Thirty years ago I studied theology at a Lutheran seminary for one turn of the academic calendar. Amanda asks me what I could have been thinking and I really don't know what to say. I was raised Lutheran, went to a college affiliated with the Lutheran church, and, upon graduating, spent a good part of my 20s studying first this and then that, never anything for too long, so maybe that explains it to a degree. On the other hand, I never studied any number of things that now seem considerably less outlandish than theology. Biochemistry. Landscape architecture.
Anyway I got to know some people who are now ordained ministers, and the other night on a whim I googled a couple of them. Oh, my. One, in White Plains, New York, sermonizes against abortion, "the silent holocaust," then berates Iraq war protesters who unfurl their banner in a side pew. "You have no right to disrupt Christian liturgy with politics!" Why not? The president can be interrupted but not you?
Clicking on hyperlinks, I land on the website of Lutheran CORE, a group of clergy and concerned lay persons who are quite worried that the biblical injunctions against homosexuality are about to be overturned by church committees. A key distinction seems to be the one between "homosexuals" and "active homosexuals." Of course these taxonomic categories are not universally relevant. No one, for example, would call the governor of South Carolina "an active heterosexual," though he evidently operated on more than one continent. I see now that the leader of Lutheran CORE is to give a talk, "Right in Whose Eyes--Ours or God's?" I guess he is not one of us and therefore can speak for God.
My general impression is of earnest hobbyists, humorless, self-important, and educated, though not over smart, who take a dim view of those who don't share their peculiar enthusiasms.
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