AIDS ministry; you're doing it wrong.

Saturday, cigarette #3

It turns out that Jean, who I had hoped would write the second most interesting senior essay in the Yale Religious Studies department's class of 2008, has surpassed all expectations and written something far more interesting than mine.

He spent the fall semester interviewing gay patients at an AIDS hospice about their religious beliefs. (He limited it to gay patients because he figured their religious beliefs would be more complicated than those of someone who caught HIV from a needle or through prostitution. AIDS is, in a very literal sense, punishment for the sins of addiction and prostitution, but whether the same can be said for the sin of homosexuality is less obvious.) By the spring, he was sitting on pages and pages of interviews and no thesis.

The angle he ultimately picked was: The Catholic and Protestant churches are dropping the ball on AIDS ministry, and it's clear that there are more than enough AIDS patients to warrant serious and specific attention, which leaves the churches with three options: minister to gay AIDS patients while maintaining a hard line on the sinfulness of homosexuality; minister to gay AIDS patients and make an endorsement of homosexuality part of that ministry; or minister to gay AIDS patients while remaining agnostic on the question of whether homosexuality is moral or not. I've only seen the preliminary data, but it's clear that his main subjects have all come to their own definite conclusions on whether or not homosexuality is moral, so it's possible that the third option simply won't work. I hope to look over a final copy when he's done with it and will, with his permission, post about it, but I was just too jazzed about the whole idea to keep it to myself.