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Have you ever read a book that turned everything you had been taught about a subject upside down? That’s where I feel I’m at on the topic of cross-gender friendships after reading Dan Brennan’s Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions.

Growing up in the evangelical church, what I’ve been taught about friendships between men and women goes something like this: be careful. Stay away (mostly). Male-female relationships mostly just lead to sex. Once you’re old enough to marry, find that right person. That person then needs to be your best, closest friend, and only cross-gender close friend for the rest of your life. Beware of spending time with people of the opposite sex for fear of damaging your reputation. (Because after all, if a man and a woman develop any sort of a relationship, it’s going to lead to sex.) Take a step even further back and make sure you don’t even do much serious communicating with those of the opposite sex because you might venture into “emotional infidelity” to your spouse.

But wait, you say, there is truth in these things. Marital unfaithfulness is, sadly, not too uncommon in the church. And when it happens, it’s devastating to men, women, children, families. I know this. As a church leader I’ve seen first-hand the damage that can be caused. But I resonate with Dan Brennan when he says that the evangelical church has gone the (sadly) usual route of putting up legalistic barriers “for protection” rather than taking down the walls and allowing for the possibility that good things could run wild. This idea that male-female relationships inevitably end in sex is something we’ve gotten from Sigmund Freud, not from God. Why can’t we wait to let Galatians 3:28 soak in (“here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”) before immediately saying “Yes, but…”?

Brennan persuasively argues that, pre-Freud, it was not uncommon for the language of friendship (both in same-gender and cross-gender friendships) to be personal and intimate in ways that make our modern minds squirm with Freud-inferred sexual tension. Yet, Brennan says, these friendships often chastely existed, and indeed co-existed alongside the healthy marriages of one or both of the friends. He quotes liberally from the early and medieval church, and cites three Biblical examples: David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In each case these relationships were intense, deep, intimate friendships; and yet in each case, no matter what Freud would tell us, these friendships were good and right and appropriate. While Brennan is arguing at times based on what he (reasonably) infers from the text, I believe the burden of proof is on those who would say “no” to this type of relationships rather than on he who is saying “yes”.

If I had one gripe with Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions while reading, it was that I wanted more practical advice or examples of what these friendships would look like when worked out in real life. Brennan provides some examples from his own cross-gender friendships; he touches briefly on things like prayer and conversation, recreation, and physical affection. But as I reflect on it, I realize I’m thinking wrongly about it. I don’t really need a book to tell me what friendships should look like. But though I agreed with Brennan that we’ve set legalistic fences in the wrong places, in expecting more concrete examples what I was really asking was “OK, where do we move the fences to?”. And if that’s all I’m asking, I’ve missed Brennan’s point. He’s saying, instead, “take down the fences.”

I’m not sure that the church is really ready to deal with Dan Brennan’s book. His ideas require buy-in from a lot of people if they are going to work. And yet, if the church were to truly buy into it, we would be a powerful example to the world of how God’s redemptive work truly makes all things new… even relationships between men and women.

Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions is worth reading and chewing on for a while. You can get it from Amazon.

Normally I’d write up a whole 250-word review for a book I finished, but The Weapon by David Poyer just doesn’t inspire that sort of review. I’ve enjoyed Poyer’s other Dan Lenson novels but this one was really just okay. A middling, disjointed story at best. As big a fan as I was of Tom Clancy back in the 90’s, I should be the last to criticize authors for hanging on and writing a long series around a single character, but Poyer appears to be the next in a long line of authors that have burned out their series that way (see also: Tom Clancy, Dale Brown).

So, yeah, I read it, and was mildly entertained… but only mildly. It’s time for these authors to start writing some creative plots instead of just stringing us along for yet another novel featuring the same guy in similar situations. Bleh.

Normally when we think about musicians and “their music”, we think about the music that they write, perform, and record. But author Ben Ratliff (jazz critic for the New York Times) decided to ask a different question. What do these musicians listen to and find influential? What are they thinking and hearing as they listen to the music? So Ratliff met with a dozen or so noted jazz musicians, asked them what tracks they’d like to listen to, and then relates to us the experience and conversations of listening to the music with the musicians. The result is The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music. It turns out to be fascinating stuff.

Though I am a musician and fancy myself a fan (though not a hardcore aficionado) of jazz, it quickly became clear to me that the plane these guys think on is just incredibly high. It is fascinating in its own way, though, listening to serious jazz players talk about how they think about jazz. My favorite part of the book, though, was the reference list at the back, where Ratliff lists each recording that he listened to with each of the musicians. It has been a great input for my personal playlist… so much to explore.

If you’re a musician, like jazz, or just want to explore the minds of some great musicians, I’d recommend picking up The Jazz Ear. It’s a short read, but quite worth it.

[You can buy The Jazz Ear from Amazon.com.]

I’ve been a big fan of Orson Scott Card’s Ender series since I read it a few years ago. Ender’s Game is just brilliant storytelling, and Speaker for the Dead is equally good, perhaps even better themes and story woven through it. So when I saw Ender In Exile on the library shelf, it was a no-brainer to pick it up.

Ender In Exile is not a book you would want to pick up and read as a stand-alone story without having at least read Ender’s Game first. EIE takes place somewhere in between two of the final chapters of Ender’s Game, telling the story of the teenaged Ender Wiggin. Once he had defeated humanity’s mortal enemies and then had his reputation dragged through the mud in court martial, he then travels off to become the governor of a colony on another planet. A good bit of the story is told in the form of emails exchanged between Ender, his parents, his siblings Valentine and Peter, and Ender’s former military commander. Ender manipulates situations with seeming effortlessness, always nobly wanting the good and right thing.

EIE will be interesting to you if you’ve read and enjoyed the other books in the Ender series. If not, I’d probably stay away from it, and would recommend Ender’s Game instead as a good introduction to Card’s work. I think it’s time that OSC come up with a new story and series.

[You can purchase Ender’s Game and Ender In Exile from Amazon.com.]