Dan J. Brennan

Gaining Momentum: Top Ten Posts for 2012

Where did this year go? Its hard to believe 2012 is almost over! What a wild year it was for me and my leadership in the cross-gender friendship movement. Yes, 2012 was year where the movement gained some traction and momentum.  We had our first Sacred Friendship Gathering in April and I'm excited about one coming in next April!

Here in chronological order of time (not in order of traffic volume) were some of my blog's most read posts in 2012.

Friendship Changes Everything: Top Ten Paul Wadell Quotes

If you’ve been around this blog for any length of time or read Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, you will know that Catholic author and moral theologian, Paul Wadell, has shaped my views on cross-sex friendship.

Paul's vision of friendship has definitely enlarged my own. I think friendship changes everything. Whether you are married or single, widowed, or divorced, friendship  changes everything. It is the path to life-transforming intimacy, happiness, and flourishing. If you're single it opens the door wide open for you to experience deep companionship, partnership, intimacy, and sharing goodness and beauty with another.

Paul, to my knowledge, has never written anything specifically focused on friendships between men and women. Some of his books have been goldmines on friendship: Friendship and the Moral Life , Becoming Friends, and Happiness and the Christian Moral Life  have helped me tremendously in helping me understand the value of preferential friendship, the importance of intimacy and mutuality in friendship. 

I have many favorite quotes from Paul. But these would have to fit in my top ten of his quotes. These have really shaped my thinking in my own life and my own vision for encouraging friendship between men and women. Here are my top ten sprinkled with my own comments. 

Friendship in a Sexualized World: Petraeus, Prior, and the Danger Narrative Pt 2

Part one if you missed it, is here. 

Now if Prior were not a Christian and embraced materialism as the ultimate reality in the cosmos we could understand sexualizing intimacy. It was Malcolm Muggeridge who observed, “Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”

For Christians, isn’t there more to the story of intimacy than stereotyping sexual intimacy as the summum bonum of interpersonal intimacy? In the sexualized world left to us post-Freud, where we do acknowledge that we are sexual beings, isn’t there still more to human intimacy in the fullness of God’s narrative?

In a sexualized world the conflation of romantic love/sexual union and intimacy as the one and only path for closeness feeds the intimacy-starved imagination of those in power and those who are not. It breeds scenarios like the Petraeus-Broadwell affair. 

But surely there is another way to reframe intimacy in the Christian narrative.

Friendship in a Sexualized World: Petraeus, Prior, and the Danger Narrative Pt 1

You saw it coming didn’t you? Once the David Petraeus affair exploded into headline news we were predestined to see the danger story of men and women getting too close.

Jenna Goudreau from Forbes immediately gave her take when she opined, “The David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell Affair: The Danger Of Male Mentors?"

It was no surprise an evangelical would express some version of the danger story. That’s as certain as Billy Graham not riding in a car alone with another woman. In the evangelical sub-culture fear continues as the undercurrent with a ubiquitous subtext in every male-female encounter.

Sure enough,  Karen Swallow Prior from Liberty University and contributing writer to Christianity Today responded with her own danger narrative in the Atlantic: “Don't Let the Petraeus Affair Keep Men From Mentoring Women.”  

My Love Letter to My Close Friend

Here is something something I wrote to my close friend, Susanne Osborne. We're 4.5 years into an intentional friendship. Susanne holds a special, special place in my heart. I love the healthy intimacy between us. It has grown immensely.

I have also come to see Susanne as an incredible leader on the front of the cross-gender friendship movement. Most of my readers would not know that. But behind the scenes, she's been amazing. Susanne was at the last Sacred Friendship Gathering. Jim Henderson interviewed her with me along with Jennifer Ould.

We need more men and women who can enter into the fullness of non-romantic intimacy like Sus and I have. There can be so much deep and vibrant beauty in non-romantic intimacy. Sus has been single for most of our relationship but she's now engaged to Jeff Calhoun. I love, love, love, the wholeheartedness Susanne has nurtured with my wholeheartedness in friendship. She's never made me feel like my friendship with her is something like a step to something greater that she's waiting for (romance/marriage). She has always received me and cherished me as a friend and as our intimacy grew she has verbalized how much she cherishes our friendship.

Bold Boundaries: 8 Reasons You Don't Want to Miss This

 As followers of Jesus our highest calling is to follow Jesus first, safety second. Not safety first, and Jesus second. That’s why I am so looking forward to the next Sacred Friendship Gathering. 

Bold Boundaries:  Expanding Friendship Between Men and Women.

Yes, most of us know about a recent study which grabbed the headlines.

We also know that some Christians think bold boundaries translates as high walls. We have the best of intentions and we want to do the right thing. We build fences and draw lines in order to protect what we see as holy, sacred. This is good, admirable - but what if some of the boundaries we create are actually keeping us locked in from following Jesus?

 

What if our present understandings of boundaries in friendship between men and women actually fence us out from real growth, from real good, from real reconciliation???

 

 

 

Here are 8 solid reasons why you don't want to miss Bold Boundaries: Expanding Friendship Between Men and Women.

 

Delight in Friendship

Diana Fritz Cates on delight in friendship (Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends):

“Intimate character-friends not only respect each other’s goodness and experience a kind of “intellectual pleasure” in the sharing of conversation and other activities. They also long for each other’s company. They are physically and emotionally stirred and delight by each other’s embodied presence (where these feelings may or may not have a genitally sexual component). 

 “Friends can and do choose, for example, to engage in activities that bring them sheer delight in each other’s embodied presence. They can and do choose to take up new activities with each other when the fire in their relationship begins to smolder. They can and do choose to cultivate ways of perceiving each other that highlight each other’s most attractive intellectual, emotional, and physical qualities. True enough, character-friends are attracted to each other chiefly on the basis of each other’s character, but it cannot be denied that a person’s character often finds partial expression in things like her physical appearance and her level of physical fitness. Friends can and do choose, to some extent, to attend in their passionate perceptions to those physical expressions that bespeak what they take to be each other’s most lovable qualities of character. They can and do choose, to some extent, to regard tenderly those expressions that bespeak each other’s deepest vulnerabilities and weaknesses.” 

Yes, authentic delight can be expressed in friendship betwen men and women.

Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

She did it!

Rachel Held Evans has created quite a stir in the good old USA with her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. So many well known voices in the evangelical world have chimed in already.

When I was just a young lad, pop singer Helen Reddy came out with the song, “I am Woman.”  It became an anthem for liberating women in the West.

Rachel’s approach in this book, her humor, her depth, her unique and provocative way of stirring the pot, her extraordinary writing power, her transparency, her knowledge of hermeneutical issues—will serve as a liberating voice for women in “biblical” communities.

She is gifted. She is a thinker. She is a lover of the Bible. She is a woman.

The Challenge of Friendship as a Leader

He doesn't know it, but Dan Allender has been such a leader to me as I have ventured forth into the uncharted waters of leading the conversation between men and women.  I have loved his book, Leading with a Limp and have come back to it again and again.

I love his thirst and hunger for friendship in leadership even when it is such a challenge and friendship troth disappears: