[Dialogue] Spong

[W. J.]

Margaret, Bishop Spong travels with his wife, introduces her, and includes her in his references to his personal life. She is his second wife. His first wife died of cancer many years ago. It's almost as if he views his current wife with reverence, as though she "saved" him from something. Maybe terminal loneliness?
The Bishop is from my home town and maybe less than a decade older than me, so we have common cultural roots. Something about a prophet being without honor in his own town? Maybe we're close enough to see the clay feet.
I'm appreciative of Spong as a speaker with a gay audience, which fawns all over him for his biting wit applied to the fundie whipping boys. But I view him as mainly a popularizer, rather than a theologian. He has done his Biblical homework, and it shows. But so have the real post-Bultmannian NT scholars.
I trust that you are taking extraordinary care of yourself in these days. And that your 'beloved community' is truly loving you.
Marshall
 

--- On Tue, 12/23/08, Margaret Helen Aiseayew <aiseayew at netins.net> wrote:

From: Margaret Helen Aiseayew <aiseayew at netins.net>
Subject: Thanks
To: "Marshall Jones" <synergi at yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, December 23, 2008, 7:41 AM





Dear Marshall,
 
Thanks so much for your last posting.  I have never met or seen Spong as far as I know, but in reading his stuff on the church relationship to gays, I found myself asking if he was a closeted gay?  It was particularly in a piece in defense of the gay bishop.  I was so taken by this thought that I went out and "googled him" to find that he did have a wife.  My experience in our community teaching RSI was that the closeted either used their wives almost as a whipping post in lecture illustrations, talking about them incessantly rather than use a variety of illustrations, or spoke of them never in their lectures.  The fact that Spong never uses his wife, not to mention his own ife to ground his thinking rather convinced me that this might be a possibility.  Since that time I have been deleting the postings of his sermons for the most part, unless there was a scripture in which I was particularly interested in the possibility of a new perspective.  I
 am just really glad that you lifted the veil on this one.  Thanks a lot!!!  Margaret
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