A Rickety Closet

Evangelical legend Elisabeth Elliot may have had a gay relationship. And that matters.
By William Stell

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Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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A Rickety Closet

By William Stell
I did not know that Virginia Mollenkott would die several months later. But I imagine that she suspected it. And that’s why she told me. I was interviewing Mollenkott for a new history of evangelicalism and homosexuality in the United States that I was writing, a history of how antigay stances came to dominate and define the evangelical movement. Back in the 1970s, Mollenkott had been part of a network of evangelical gay activists who knew that evangelical homophobia had not always been so dominant. This network advocated for the full acceptance of gay and lesbian people within evangelicalism, and…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.