In 1999, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a tenured English
professor at Syracuse University, a skeptic of all things Christianity,
and in a committed lesbian relationship. Her academic specialty was
Queer Theory, a postmodern form of gay and lesbian studies.
Today Butterfield is a mother of four, a homemaker, and wife of a
Presbyterian pastor named Kent. They live in Durham, North Carolina.
She is an unlikely convert. And in this episode of the Authors on the Line
podcast, Butterfield shares the story of her conversion from a radical
lesbian to a redeemed Christian. It's a story involving a pastor, a
pretty ordinary local church, and a Bible.
“I tried to toss the Bible and all of its teachings in the trash — I
really tried,” she says.
“But I kept reading it, reading it not just for
pleasure, but reading it because I was engaged in a research program
trying to refute the religious right from a lesbian feminist
perspective. . . . After my second or third, maybe fourth, pass through
the entire Bible something started to happen. The Bible got to be bigger
inside me than I. And it absolutely overflowed into my world. I really
fought against it. And then one Sunday morning, no different from any
other Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an
hour later I sat in a church pew. I went there very conspicuous of the
fact that I didn’t fit in. But I really had to confront this God.”
And she did. Continue at Tony Reinke
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