TWO CULTURAL ESSAYS BY R.R. RENO
(Saturday) Mars Hill Audio has posted in .pdf format two chapters from R. R. Reno's recent book, In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity. The first, "Postmodern Irony and Petronian Humanism," Reno examines "the contemporary allergy to authority and flight from truth." The second is, "Sex in the Episcopal Church."

A quote from the latter: I do not want to be misunderstood. Such affirmation and pastoral guidance are not desired only by homosexuals. In fact, by my analysis, our deeper class preoccupations have little to do with homosexuality. Plenty of divorced men and women want reassurances that it is OK to enter into the world of “date, then fornicate.” Plenty of parents want the priest to tell them that having their son’s girlfriend sleep in his bed during a visit over Thanksgiving break is OK. Plenty of unmarried thirtysomethings want to go to church as couples, eager to normalize their lives and test the deeper waters of adult responsibility, and do so without judgment. For us, homosexuality is not about the “heterocentric culture”; it is about joining the Bohemian side to the Bourgeois. It is about reconciling sexual freedom with upperclass respectability and perquisites. The role of homosexuality is simple. If homosexuality is OK, than our transgressions are OK...

Thus the gay issue has a transcending importance in the Episcopal Church. It serves to sustain the Bourgeois Bohemian dream. We can have everything: sexual freedom and the outward signs of moral order and personal honor. This is why the issue is not toleration. We very much want public acknowledgment and celebration of respectable gay couples. A thrice-divorced bishop can find reassurance in such success stories. And in the ecclesiastical world of would-be bohemian saints, the dream is even more remarkable. The clergy want more than respectability. They want sexual freedom and personal sanctity. For this reason clerics are easily tempted into mysticisms of the orgasm. It is not enough for sexual freedoms to be respectable; those freedoms must be revelatory and sacramental.

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