Author: admin
Homilies (Year B)
In 2020, James started Praying Eucharistically, a project exploring the ways of worshipping and Christian living in the Covid lockdown. For this project, he provides the appropriate liturgical texts for people celebrating at home and offers Gospel readings and homilies in video format for Sundays and the main festivities of the liturgical year. All videos can be…
No More Special Pleading: How Opening Up to LGBTQ+ Reality Flows Organically from Basic Christianity
At St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, US, James Alison presented a project he’s been working on for several years—a book, provisionally titled You Can… If You Want To, to be published in 2025, which aims to empower Christians to move on, in good faith, regarding LGBTQ+ issues. The narrative that Christianity itself demands the condemnation of LGBTQ+ lives…
Spirit, Witness, and Learning: Fiducia Supplicans and the LGBT endgame in the Catholic ChurchSpirit, Witness, and Learning:
We aren’t there yet, but the presence of people who are able in good conscience, and without fear to stand up, to bear witness to their lives in Christ, and to say that they do so as gay or lesbian people themselves, is the vital sign of what is to come next.
Catholicity, Sacrifice, and Shame: Subverting Polarization in Our Contemporary Ecclesial and Political Cultures
How do we, who know that God’s glory showed itself among us by being lifted up in shame, find the grace to live with our shame uncovered such that we are not inclined to shame others?
LGBT, the Church and the new rules of the game
By reaffirming traditional teaching on marriage, but insisting that same-sex couples are “blessable” rather than “contemptible”, Pope Francis has opened a way forward that will allow LGBT Catholics to be listened to on their own terms while maintaining the unity of the Church. Published by The Tablet, 4 January 2024 MY HEART SANK on hearing of…
“Sodomy” and “Homosexuality” Are Not Biblical Sins
One of my jobs as a priest is to help people discern which of the acts they have done (or might do) are genuinely sins―and which are not really sins, even though they might think they are. Priests do this so that people can participate in being forgiven when they have genuinely done something wrong…
What is scapegoating? Why Gay Catholic priest James Alison spent years learning why people target minorities
At the age of nine, Catholic priest and scholar James Alison realised two things. The first was that he was gay. The second was that his life would never be the same. “I did know immediately that basically, I was lost,” he tells ABC RN’s Soul Search. “I was afloat on a sea with no port.…
Homilies (Year A)
n 2020, James started Praying Eucharistically, a project exploring the ways of worshipping and Christian living in the Covid lockdown. For this project, he provides the appropriate liturgical texts for people celebrating at home and offers Gospel readings and homilies in video format for Sundays and the main festivities of the liturgical year.
What does radical inclusion really mean for a modern synodal Church
The James Alison Forum, What does radical inclusion really mean for a modern synodal Church, on 27 September 2023 was organised by the Catalyst for Renewal in St Aloysius’ College Kirribilli, Sydney. It was moderated by Geraldine Doogue and assisted by Finn Stannard. The word of the night was “talkability”. If an idea has talkability the issue can be explored,…
Why do we scapegoat?
James Alison says scapegoating is one of our oldest social behaviours. But casting someone out to maintain group cohesion has its obvious drawbacks — particularly for the person taking the fall! As a gay Catholic priest, Dr Alison was drawn to the work of French polymath René Girard, who proposed that scapegoating is not the…