"I want to be a voice for trans people in the church." Anglican priest Theo Robinson leaving Manitoba for new role in B.C.

“I want to be a voice for trans people in the church.”

 

That’s what Theo Robinson, who serves as an Anglican priest in Manitoba, says.

 

Robinson, the first trans person ordained to be a priest in the Diocese of Rupert’s Land—and likely the first in Canada, too—is leaving the province to take a new role as a priest in B.C.

 

Before he left, he shared his story with me (again). By telling it, Robinson hopes to make it easier for other transgender Christians to feel welcome in the church.

“Ignorance brings on hate,” he said, adding that more exposure to the stories of trans Christians can normalize them as people who also are faithfully following Jesus.

Read my story about Robinson in the Free Press.

A lunatic question: Whose side is God on in the Middle East when it comes to war?

As a rule, I try to refrain from writing about the Middle East. The conflicts in that region are mostly geopolitical, not religious. But every now and then religion leaps to the forefront and can’t be ignored. 

That’s what happened during the so-called “12-day war” between Israel, the U.S. and Iran, when leaders of all three countries invoked God and their respective religions to justify their actions. 

It started with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was followed by Donald Trump. And then came Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—all of the invoking God as being on their side against their enemies. 

Which raises several questions, starting with: If, as these monotheistic religions claim, there is only one God, who does that God listen to when asked to bless the wars of one country or another? 

Or maybe, as Mark Twain wrote, that's a lunatic question.

Read more in my recent Free Press column.