Book review: Openness Unhindered by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

In 2012, an author with the improbable name of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield wrote a book relating an even more improbable tale: the story of a liberal lesbian professor being confronted with the gospel and following it out of her tenured position, romantic partnership, and activist community to a life as a homeschooling mother and wife of a pastor in a conservative church. Sounds like one of those sappy and unbelievable faith-based films, except that the author was writing her own memoir.  The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert was undoubtedly a Harry-Potter level blockbuster for a small church press which mostly sells psalters and devotionals.

The thirty-second book I read in 2015 was Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ, Butterfield's second volume on her experiences after conversion.  This installment has less to do with the events of her life and more to do with theology, philosophy, and Christian living.  Covering her thoughtful conclusions on the new birth, shame, the concept of sexual orientation (unknown before the nineteenth century when sex acts were actions a person took, not an identity which irrevocably defined him), and the ramifications of how one identifies oneself, she ends with a beautiful depiction of community and hospitality which challenges and convicts, even as it makes you long to be a part of the fellowship of the saints rightly practiced.

If you're looking for a Tweetable inspirational quote, try this one, after the Butterfield's home was robbed: "where God is in your loss matters more to a skeptical, unbelieving, and watching world than where God is in your plenty."  If you want to have your perspective stretched and your heart challenged, read the whole book.  May God continue to bless the Butterfields and use them to reach the skeptical world as they galvanize the believers.