Escaping God's Closet: The Revelations of a Queer Priest
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (941 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0813920043 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 301 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A man who has done great things" according to Mr. D. P. Jay. This autobiography depicts a great man who has moved from Christianity to atheism, has ministered to suicides and people with AIDS, taught university students and been an activist.The whole book charts his beliefs and his unpicking of them: "Early in life we sort experiences according to inherited beliefs and theories; later these are shaken when we discover unexpected facts, or ones that others have suppressed. Religions, for example, those sup¬posed repositories of ultimate meaning, still claim the loyalty of millions even while the accelerating pa. A sweeping book Bernard Mayes is a visionary. Escaping God's Closet is a book of startling scale, as it is more than an autobiography. It's a thesis on what existence means, with Mayes's life presented as the evidence. Everything is connected, we are all mutually interdependentand we must all escape "God's closet" in order to form the ties that bind and ultimately help us to survive.
This fascinating memoir by a gay British priest begins in London in 1929, when Bernard Mayes emerged from his heavily sedated mother, and, according to the practice of the day, was sequestered by doctors for a month, returning to her sickly and fretful. All the elements of a blockbuster movie are here--sex, oppression, and the Sturm und Drang of romance--set against a wider historical backdrop. Mayes's introspective retelling of his journey--from his staid Anglican roots, to a tour of the American South at the height of the civil rights movement, and finally to the gay mecca of San Francisco--should resonate wi
In an entirely honest and engaging voice, Mayes offers considerably more than autobiographical recollections of his life as priest, journalist, university teacher and administrator, and gay rights activist. Throughout Escaping God's Closet, Bernard Mayes recounts how social and doctrinal oppression posed fundamental challenges to his own belief system, but led him to revelations about sexuality, Christianity, and the nature of human existence itself.. And all the while, Bernard Duncan Mayes struggled to reconcile his views on sexualityand his experience as a gay manwith his theological and cultural beliefs. He survived a turbulent childhood in war-torn L