Is it ok to lie? + Winter Is Coming

What this episode covers

Our podcast interview mini-series has come to an end and we had a blast sharing some listener stories with you. More’s coming (hopefully) if we can get the support we need over on Patreon. In this episode, Fr. Shay and Brian share some 2020 plans for Queer Theology, respond to a reader asking if it’s ok to lie, talk about self-care around unaffirming families (especially during the holidays), and give a sneak peek of what’s to come on the podcast in December and in the new year.   Episode Transcript Brian: Welcome to the Queer Theology podcast! Fr. Shay: Where each episode, we take a queer look at the week’s lectionary readings. We’re the co-founders of QueerTheology.com and the hosts for this podcast. I’m Father Shay Kearns  B: And I’m Brian G. Murphy. Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to the Queer Theology podcast. It’s been a fun month here at the Queer Theology podcast. The past few weeks we’ve been featuring some interviews with listeners and Sanctuary Collective members and it’s been fun to hear some of those stories and share them with you. We had Indigo, Caryn and Brandon. If you missed those episodes, you can always head on over to queertheology.com/listen to check them out. So we’re done with the interviews for a while. We’re hoping that in the next year we can do more of these and with a wide range of folks. We are interested in doing a series with activists, a series with musicians, a series with parents, a series on sex and relationships, and just extending the episodes so that we can share more stories. The Bible is fun, but we’ve been talking about the Bible for six years, and so we want to add some more of you into these episodes. So with that, you’d probably know that we are in the midst of a bit Patreon push. The podcast, past 300 episodes a few weeks ago and we’re trying to make this work a little bit more sustainable, so we wanted to give you a quick update on that before diving into a listener email and talking about self-care as the winter holidays approach. To share some plans for what to look forward to on the podcast in December. So Shay, can you give us a little update on where things are with Patreon and remind folks why we are doing this. FS: Yeah! It’s been so amazing to see the response to our Patreon push already. So our goal was to raise $25000 a month in pledges in order to make this work sustainable. As Brian said, we’ve been doing this for six years. We figured that we make about an average of $2/hour for all of the work that we do which is creating tons and tons of free resources and doing lots and lots of pastoral counseling. We’ve figured out that we’ve answered over 20,000 emails since we started the website which is just wild. And so, we’ve really come to the realization that this work is not sustainable at that $2 an hour thing. So we wanted to see if our community was interested in supporting the work and helping make it sustainable for the long haul. It looks the answer is yes or at least for some of you which is really fantastic. We are up to just under $500 a month pledged on Patreon which is huge. It’s not even close to our goal at this point, so we’re still trying to figure out what that looks like moving forward. So if you’re interested in joining those pledges, you can go to patreon.com/queertheology. We have so many plans and so much more that we want to be able to do, but we just can’t do it at this point unless we have some help. I know Brian, for you, this is even a more scary time because you got laid off from your job. B: Yeah, I sure did. A few months ago, I got laid off from my full-time job and so the entire time that QueerTheology.com has existed, I’ve had a full-time job that pays me to exist. Sometimes it pays me for things for QueerTheology when we wanted to do something new and there isn’t enough money for it. Like Shay and I have dipped into our own personal savings to make this work happen. So it’s a little bit scary now to not have that in and obvious