Sunday, July 20, 2008

Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion

Oliver O'Donovan has just released a new book published by Wipf and Stock called Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion. Here is the publisher's blurb (which, given the Latin, I assume probably originated with the author):

What if the challenge gay men and women present the church with is not emancipatory but hermeneutic? Suppose that at the heart of the problem there is the magna quaestio, the question about the gay experience, its sources and its character, that gays must answer for themselves: how this form of sensibility and feeling is shaped by its social context and how it can be clothed in an appropriate pattern of life for the service of God and discipleship of Christ? But suppose, too, that there is another question corresponding to it, which non-gay Christians need to answer: how and to what extent this form of sensibility and feeling has emerged in specific historical conditions, and how the conditions may require, as an aspect of the pastoral accommodation that changing historical conditions require, a form of public presence and acknowledgment not hitherto known? These two questions come together as a single question: how are we to understand together the particularity of the age in which we are given to attest God's works?
H/T Halden.

UPDATE: In the UK, the book has been published by SCM with the title, A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The churches and the gay controversy. This is, I believe, a superior title in that it better reflects the tone and content of the text. The breathlessness of the US title seems to be more concerned with trying to shift copies. A good review of the book can be found here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the alert; during my luncheon I asked Moore Books to order it for me.

byron smith said...

Christianity Today: A review of O'D's book and two others on the topic.

byron smith said...

Romans 1.26-27: is Paul articulating a position with which he actually disagrees?