Speakers: James Alison, Catholic Priest & Theologian
James Alison: I was brought up, as many people were, with the basic assumption that Christianity is one thing. In matters LGBT, and as far as people ever talked about them, then were basically dirty and obviously the sort of thing that Christians, as indeed any decent people would be against. And the result has been, of course, that for a long time, many of us who've tried to find a way of living out the Christian faith honestly as LGBT people have found ourselves having to engage in arguments that sound an awful lot like special pleading. And that has seemed to me to be possibly because of certain moralistic underpinnings to the understanding of what is basic about Christian faith. What I've been working out over the last 40 years or so has been recovering a quite different paradigm to understand basic Christianity, which I hope you will see is actually strangely much more conservative, old fashioned, and in tune with the biblical narrative, the ones we're normally given.
