Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay

by James Alison

Discrimination against gays and lesbians extends from the highest echelons of the Catholic Church to the pews. For James Alison, a gay Catholic theologian, the key to moving beyond resentment is a radical re-conversion to the gospel message of God’s love and understanding that even those in power are our brothers and sisters.

Genres: Theology, Nonfiction, Religion, Christianity, LGBT, Spirituality, Queer

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 1997

About the author

James Alison (b. 1959) is a Catholic theologian, priest and author. He grew up in an evangelical family in England and converted to Catholicism as a teenager. Alison studied at Oxford and earned his doctorate in theology from the Jesuit Faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He was a member of the Dominican order from 1981-1995.

Reviews

[Aeisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing Alison book. I actually think this is the best so far, since it shows him in a pastoral voice, reading scripture and reading our times, so that we can hear how radical God's salvation really is.

The central idea that Alison circles around in this book is the idea of creation. His argument is that there is no other way to speak of creation except from the viewpoint of Jesus' resurrection. This means that Jesus' resurrection shows that the death-dealing, sacred structure of this world is not somehow "natural," not some part of the "created order." And what being a disciple is, is learning to live into this new creation, or as he so often puts it, "learning to relax into love," or "learning how not to be scandalized."

Read it.

[Joe Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read every book since. Alison has completely overturned my understanding of christianity. If you do enjoy this book, I highly recommend reading the rest.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this book! There’s little more I can say than that.

Allison is clearly brilliant, and, though I certainly don’t agree with all the perspectives he offers in this book, I can also certainly say that this book helped me grow in faith and feel closer to the Lord; what a wonderful gift!

I’ll add that while this book does focus on queerness and the Catholic Church it really talks about a much broader set of issues than that seemingly narrow one, and I think it could be useful to anyone looking to grow in their Christian faith or to better understand the role of the Christian church in modern life.

The last thing I’ll say is that it is amazing how relevant this book still is though it was written almost 25 years ago. I often felt like Allison was speaking directly about contemporary issues in the Church even though he of course wasn’t.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faith Beyond Resentment is a collection of essays from Father James Alison, a Roman Catholic priest known for his popularization of René Girard and Girardian interpretations of the New Testament in particular. Alison was laicized, without his consent, by a local bishop in Brazil, in relation to the status of his vows, which he himself called into question because of a romantic relationship he had developed with another man. While the current status of his priesthood remains uncertain, Alison has since become a major voice on LGBTQ matters within and beyond Catholicism. This book, then, is one of his most fully realized efforts to articulate his theological vision, specifically as related to gay identity and gay relationships in the Catholic Church.

The first set of essays, which fall under the header, “Inhabiting the Text,” are sophisticated interpretations of well-known and, sometimes, esoteric texts in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. They represent some of the finest biblical exegesis one can find that is at once intensely scholarly, radically subversive, and still, for all that, deeply orthodox. Standout essays include “Spluttering up the beach to Nineveh,” a meditation inspired by the story of Jonah on creation, nature, and the violent idolatry of so many of our social constructs, and “Clothed and in his right mind,” a Girardian take on the Gerasene demoniac, whom Jesus heals and then instructs to return home to his friends, to “tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you” (Mark 5:19). The second set of essays, which Alison titles “Attempting a Voice,” is more constructive than the prior exegesis in that it puts to work theologically many of the concepts developed in the first half of the book, such as non-sacrificial divine presence, idolatry, and creation. Alison also offers in this second section the outline of a theory of biblical textual criticism, heavily influenced by Girard, by which he claims gay Christians can locate their own stories in the biblical narrative “of being called into being and rejoiced in.” The last chapter, titled “Nicodemus and the boys in the square,” rendered in the form of a fictional trial between gay men in drag—part cosplay, part Platonic dialogue—dramatizes what is, perhaps, Alison’s most comprehensive critique of Catholic doctrine on “homosexual desire” as “objectively disordered.” It amounts to an immensely creative, learned, and deeply Catholic interpretation of Trent’s claims about human desire vis-a-vis gay love and relationships.

Alison, both a scholar and a preacher, approaches his theological task with both erudition and rhetorical panache. Take, for example, this representative passage from “Spluttering up the beach to Nineveh”:

While in theory the teaching on the natural order of creation should fall even-handedly on straight and gay alike, in fact there is usually enough residual sense of being ‘natural’ among straight people for the teaching not to pursue them to the depths of their being as it tends to do with us. The result is that we have found ourselves forced through into being the advance guard of a serenity about nothing human being simply ‘natural,’ but everything being part of a human social construct, to the extent where we can begin to imagine God quite removed from any justification of the present order, and yet ever palpitating beneath the vertiginous possibilities of the bringing of a divine order into being. . . . The collapse of the ‘natural’ is not the collapse of belief in creation, it is a part of clearing the human space of violent idolatry and it allows the persistent gentleness of the Creator and his invitation to adventurous participation to become apparent.

Or consider these remarks from “Clothed and in his right mind,” in which Alison examines how Girard’s scapegoat mechanism functions in the story of the Gerasene demoniac:

The violence of the group knows only how to shout defensively, how awkwardly to bury the unspeakable in convenient silences. The violent heart dictates the tone and tenor even of fine-seeming words. Being in a right mind means coming, tentatively, through a process of the heart, into a place where speech rests on a quizzical imagination, unperturbed by the apparent impossibility of a new sort of gathering. It is confident that the truth can be spoken peacefully, and it is quietly immune to strength.

Faith Beyond Resentment is not just a superb work of queer theology, it is an essential work of Catholic theology uncannily relevant to this moment in the United States and across the world. Alison articulates a vision for the Catholic Church that would reorient its stance toward worldly powers and principalities as part of what it truly means to “be not conformed to this world” but renewed by the grace of Christ (Romans 12:2). While it is often difficult for Catholics to envision how such a reorientation would come about—take one look at the conservative backlash to Pope Francis’s papacy, this despite the fact that Francis has neither ushered in any serious structural reformations in Church governance nor presided over major doctrinal revisions vis-a-vis gay marriage, married priests, or other hot-button social issues—Alison exhorts frustrated Catholics not to mimic the same self-satisfied, sanctimonious posture ostensibly adopted by conservative Church hierarchs. “They knowingly run the risk of looking like Pharisees and fools in the eyes of history, a burden some of them bear with considerable grace and patience, and they do so as a service to us,” Alison writes. “We are not Catholic if we refuse the possibility that Pharisees as well as free spirits share in the Spirit’s keeping alive of God’s revelation in Christ.” Alison effectively reminds his fellow Catholics that, despite its troubled history, its deep aversion to rapid transformation, and the injustices its behavior has compounded in relation to sexual abuse, access to contraceptives, and LGBTQ identities, the Church is not, for Catholics at least, just another political institution subject to the vicissitudes of the will to power. As Paul insists, the Church is a mystical body with Christ as its head, led by the Holy Spirit in history. “What the living presence of the risen Lord enables us to do,” Alison writes, “is to discern when and where our gatherings are in fact signs of the Kingdom which is the always contemporary outbreak of creation in our midst, and when they are in fact the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’—the pious disguise of the sacrificial world in which we are so tempted to seek to restore.”

[Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazingly fresh look at scripture as it relates to the outsider and the establishment.

Its not an easy read and some chapters passed me by but that's OK

[Bridget Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed my life

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing style is a bit indirect and dense. Took some getting used to. But I enjoyed the valuable and original ideas. The theme is that humans like to set up a dynamic where there is an excluded person/class, or scapegoat, that everyone can line up in opposition to. Alison challenges us to think what our churches and communities could look like if we rejected duality and listened to the truth and life experiences of everyone, "without resentment."

[Rubén · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Allison encuentra en el evangelio una serie de personajes y pasajes que iluminan en el s. XXI una mirada misericordiosa y liberadora de las personas de la diversidad sexual. Esta obra es ya un clásico en torno a la pastoral LGBTQ+ en clave cristiana. Además de mirar hacia la obra de Paul Ricoer y su teoría mimética como categoría de análisis para una relectura de los textos bíblicos.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly beautiful collection of essays/talks that cover the breadth of biblical story and church theology. Every reading is both impeccably learned and deeply imaginative in a way that brings out the real life of tradition and the ways in which it touches and shapes lives.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the notion of this book, but James Allison is quite a difficult read. He writes long sentences and seems to lead you to a long end.

[Huw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honey, you tought me how the world can spin again

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent series of essays written about James Alison's process of getting past resentment to a new birth of faith.

[Sergio Viula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interessante, uma vez que o padre que escreve é gay assumido e continua atuando na Igreja Católica ao mesmo tempo em que dá voz ao segmento gay do rebanho. Claro que num ambiente sufocante, todo basculante aberto já é um enorme avanço, mas há que se abrir muitas janelas ainda. O que James Alison tem feito é valioso, pensando em termos emancipatórios (do ponto de vista individual) e inclusivos (do ponto de vista institucional e comunitário).

[Jacques le fataliste et son maître]

Sono molto curioso di vedere gli strumenti di analisi girardiani applicati al tema della costruzione dell’immagine dell’omosessuale nel mondo religioso.
Si tratta, per inciso, dell’ennesimo contributo di Transeuropa alla divulgazione del pensiero girardiano.

[Sarah Boyette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read the first chapter, had to put it down. Difficult reading.. Will try again when I'm smarter.

[Sister Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know where to put this. It's a collection of essays, so rather "occasional." I prefer reading Alison's more focused works.