The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism

The past decade has seen homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church becoming ever more visible, and the Vatican's directives on homosexuality becoming ever more forceful, begging the question Mark Jordan tries to answer here: how can the Catholic Church be at once so homophobic and so homoerotic? His analysis is a keen and readable study of the tangled relationship between male homosexuality and modern Catholicism. "[Jordan] has offered glimpses, anecdotal stories, and scholarly observations that are a whole greater than the sum of its parts. . . . If homosexuality is the guest that refuses to leave the table, Jordan has at least shed light on why that is and in the process made the whole issue, including a conflicted Catholic Church, a little more understandable."—Larry B. Stammer, Los Angeles Times "[Jordan] knows how to present a case, and with apparently effortless clarity he demonstrates the church's double bind and how it affects Vatican rhetoric, the training of priests, and ecclesiastical protectiveness toward an army of closet cases. . . . [T]his book will interest readers of every faith."—Daniel Blue, Lambda Book Report A 2000 Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Politics & Social Sciences

Mark D. Jordan

Social Sciences

University of Chicago Press

No one doubts that the reading of authoritative texts lay at the centre of medieval theology, philosophy, and letters; repeated efforts to explain that reading, however, have not been persuasive. The 14 contributors to "Ad litterum" address the medieval interpretation and use of authoritative texts in the different disciplines united by the medieval practice of reading. The authors share the intention to recover medieval readings as they would want to be recovered. Thus the essays suggest that the present-day reader must replace presumptions about historically pure reading or critically creative reading with the different assumptions evident in the learned culture of the Middle Ages. Central among these assumptions are the analogies of reading that bind together medieval letters, philosophy, and theology. Contributors include: M.T Gibson, Daniel I. Sheerin, Marcia L. Colish, Stephen Gersh, G.R. Evans, R.H. Rouse and M.A. Rouse, Siegfried Wenzel, L.-J. Bataillon, O.P., Stephen F. Brown, Albert Zimmermann, Mark D. Jordan, Raymond Macken, O.F.M., A.J. Minnis, and Kent Enery, Jr.

Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers (Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Kent Emery Jr.

History & Criticism

University of Notre Dame Press

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Books by Mark D. Jordan