From Inside Higher Ed:
When Dwayne Walker went up for tenure this past academic year at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, he was invited to a luncheon with members of the Board of Trustees. There, he says, trustees questioned him on new faith statements adopted last year by the university.
The trustees asked how he taught creationism in his classes. Walker, an assistant professor of social work, replied he did not teach the topic, as it was not relevant in his discipline.
What about homosexuality, the trustees asked. Is it always a sin? No, Walker told them, not necessarily. He further “suggested it may be that categorizing all ‘homosexual behavior’ as a sin is not a productive way to reach people for Christ,” as he recalls in a written statement he submitted as part of a complaint to SBU’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission.
“One of the trustees stated that my answer was ambiguous,” Walker wrote in the statement. “I agreed and stated there is much ambiguity in this area in our culture right now.”
Things Walker said he was not asked about include “my tenure packet, my profession (social work) or anything else related to the service to my university.” Letters from his tenure packet that he submitted as part of his HLC complaint show that the faculty vote in favor of his tenure was unanimous (23 in favor, zero against, three abstentions), and that he was highly recommended for tenure by his dean and department chair based on his strong record of teaching, scholarship and service to his university, community and church.
The strong support from colleagues and supervisors was apparently not enough. A March 11 letter from interim SBU president Brad Johnson says that Walker was denied tenure because “concerns existed regarding the effectiveness in ‘carrying forth the mission of the university,’ … particularly in your alignment with the University Statements of Faith and University Principles and Expectations.”
Walker was floored.
“I’ve been a Southern Baptist my entire life, I’m a deacon in a Southern Baptist church, but I am no longer aligned with the faith statement of the university simply because of that one belief,” he said. “I don’t necessarily believe that everyone who is gay or lesbian or non-heterosexual is living a sinful life. That apparently is enough for them not to grant me tenure.”
The denial of tenure to Walker is not an isolated story. It’s part of a much broader dispute about theological orthodoxy at SBU and alleged efforts by the Missouri Baptist Convention to bring the university under closer control.
Last year the board approved new governance documents that name the Missouri Baptist Convention as the sole corporate member of Southwest Baptist University, a member being defined under Missouri corporation law as an entity that has the right to vote for the election of a corporation’s director or directors.
The changes to the governance documents — which are being challenged in court — also narrow the range of acceptable religious beliefs for professors and administrators, stipulating that the university “employs faculty and administrators who affirm, teach, and live in a manner consistent with and not contrary to” the Baptist Faith & Message 2000.
Theology, ministry and philosophy faculty must separately affirm the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which says “the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God”; the Danvers Statement, which affirms distinct, divinely ordained gender roles for men and women and man’s “headship” in the family and in church; and the Nashville Statement, which holds that God designed marriage to be between a man and woman and states that “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism.”
There is a lot more to this story. Read the entire thing here.
Thanks to Brian Kaylor of Word & Way for bringing this to my attention.
Why Celibacy Matters
How the critique of Catholicism changes and yet remains the same.
The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality. This rhetorical trope has persisted despite radical redefinitions of what healthy sexuality means; one sexual culture overthrows another, but Catholicism remains eternally condemned.
Thus in a 19th-century context, where healthy sexuality meant a large patriarchal family with the wife as the angel in the home, anti-Catholic polemicists were obsessed with Catholicism’s nuns — these women who mysteriously refused husbands and childbearing, and who were therefore presumed to be prisoners in gothic convents, victims of predatory priests.
Then a little later, when the apostles of sexual health were Victorian “muscular Christians” worried about moral deviance, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too hospitable to homosexuality — too effete, too decadent, too Oscar Wildean even before Wilde’s deathbed conversion.
Then later still, when sexual health meant the white-American, two-kid nuclear family, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too obsessed with heterosexual procreation, too inclined to overpopulate the world with kids.
And now, in our own age of sexual individualism, Catholicism is mostly just accused of a repressive cruelty, of denying people — and especially its celibacy-burdened priests — the sexual fulfillment that every human being needs.
The mix of change and consistency in anti-Catholic arguments came to mind while I was reading “In the Closet of the Vatican,” a purported exposé of homosexuality among high churchmen released to coincide with the church’s summit on clergy sexual abuse. The book, written by a gay, nonbelieving French journalist, Frédéric Martel, makes a simple argument in a florid, repetitious style: The prevalence of gay liaisons in the Vatican means that clerical celibacy is a failure and a fraud, as unnatural and damaging as an earlier moral consensus believed homosexuality to be.
The style of Martel’s account is fascinating because it so resembles the old Protestant critique of Catholic decadence. Instead of a tough-guy Calvinist proclaiming that Catholicism’s gilt and incense makes men gay, it’s a gay atheist claiming that the gays use Catholicism’s gilt and incense to decorate the world’s most lavish closet. Instead of celibacy making men deviant, celibacy is the deviance, and open homosexuality the cure. Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.
The book is quite bad; too many of its attempted outings rely on the supposed infallibility of Martel’s gaydar. And yet anyone who knows anything about the Vatican knows that some of the book’s gossip is simply true — just as the other critiques of Catholicism have some correspondence to reality.
Homosexuality: It’s about survival – not sex | James O’Keefe | TEDxTallaght
This passionate talk from Dr. James O’Keefe MD gives us a deeply personal and fascinating insight into why homosexuality is indeed a necessary and extraordinarily useful cog in nature’s wheel of perfection. James H O’Keefe MD, is a Board Certified Cardiologist and Director of both the Charles & Barbara Duboc Cardio Health & Wellness Center and the Preventive Cardiology service at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute. He is also Professor of Medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His postgraduate training included a cardiology fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr O’Keefe is board-certified in Cardiology, Internal Medicine, Nuclear Cardiology, and Cardiac CT Imaging. He is consistently ranked among the ‘Top Doctor’ lists regionally and nationally as one of America’s Top Rated Physicians in Cardiology. He has been named as one of USA Today’s Most Influential Doctors. Dr O’Keefe has contributed more than 300 articles to the medical literature and has authored best-selling cardiovascular books for health professionals including: The Complete Guide to ECGs (which is used for Cardiology Board Certification), Dyslipidemia Essentials, and Diabetes Essential.
Jesus’ Parents and Roy Moore’s Gall
When Zeigler was asked by The Washington Examiner about an allegation that the Senate candidate Roy Moore initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32, Zeigler cited the biblical couple to say, essentially: No biggie! This is as old as Christianity.
“Take Joseph and Mary,” he explained. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.” He made it sound as if Moore were some religiously inclined analogue to those military-history enthusiasts who dress in the uniforms of yesteryear to travel back to the Revolutionary War. Moore was merely re-enacting the New Testament in the name of lust.
It’s worth pointing out that there is something illegal here: A 14-year-old girl is below the age of consent in Alabama, and that was true as well four decades ago, when the incident is alleged to have occurred. It’s also worth pointing out that Jesus supposedly arrived via virgin birth, so Joseph’s interactions with Mary up until that point may have been considerably more G-rated and gallant than in Zeigler’s version.
It’s further worth pointing out that millenniums ago, girls were treated as chattel and sold off as child brides, a practice that no one in his or her right mind would regard as inspirational and cite as an exonerating precedent.
.. If I sound bitter, I am, because they have long been among the principal purveyors of hatred for gay people like me. They’re a big reason that so many of us grew up terrified that we’d be ostracized, wondering if there was something twisted in us and confronted with laws that treated us as second-class citizens. We were supposedly in moral error, and thus deserved a lesser lot.
.. In 2002 he called sexual relations between people of the same gender “an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.”
.. Although Christianity as I understand it doesn’t smile on the florid lying, womanizing, hypersexual vocabulary and assorted cruelties that have been prominent threads in Donald Trump’s life, Moore and many other evangelical Christians spared Trump their censure. I understand their motivation to vote for him: abortion. But that didn’t compel them to remain so mum about his misdeeds or summon the adoration that some of them did. (I’m looking at you, Jerry Falwell Jr.)