I am finding your religious turn and proselytising difficult. How do you reconcile your faith with the church’s devastating history of sexism, homophobia, paedophilia etc. It’s not good enough to differentiate Jesus from the Christian religion since they draw on his words and teachings. Don’t you feel you’re letting down (even alienating) your queer and female fans?
JEMMA (A TRANSGENDER FAN) @ Issue no. 280[ ] Over the years I detached myself from religion until I became an atheist. Yesterday, I had video contact with friends in the USA and a husband of one, Paul E, an American banjo player with whom I play, has cancer and is very weak. His wife asked us to think of him, which I do all the time, but also to pray for him. I find myself caught between my desire to respond to the request and that of preserving an intellectual honesty that would avoid being confronted with a lie.
JEAN-MARC @ Issue no. 265Yesterday, I was listening to your BBC interview, and the interviewer asked you to discuss the distinction you make between spirituality and religion – I’m interested in this distinction too, and it’s something I wrestle with. [ ] What do you do when you’re a woman who would like the kind of spirituality with rigour that religion affords, but your faith, and much of its rigour is stacked against your sex? What to do, when the faith you were raised in continues to make decisions that isolate women, and prevents women from being fully themselves in the church and the world? [ ] I haven’t been to church, or even prayed for a long time. I’ve been angry at my church because women continue to be discriminated against, and because not all of us were safe there. [ ] Christ is still compelling for me – and while congregations are still mostly made up of women – how do the rest of us practice within a church that we know hates us.
CLAIRE @ Issue no. 215Not sure if there is a whole lot of sex in your religion or a whole lot of religion in your sex. Which is it?
KIARA @ Issue no. 42