![]() Since then the book has become a staple in homosexual literature.įor instance, Bruce Bawer’s much-discussed A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (Poseidon Press) devotes page after page to a precis of Boswell, as though this is the only necessary text in Christian history dealing with homosexuality. I would not hesitate to call his book revolutionary, for it tells of things heretofore unimagined and sets a standard of excellence that one would have thought impossible in the treatment of an issue so large, uncharted, and vexed.” The next year Boswell won the American Book Award for History. The reviewer in the New York Times said Boswell “restores one’s faith in scholarship as the union of erudition, analysis, and moral vision. The Boswell book was at first met with widespread acclaim. ![]() That, Boswell says, is the unhappy legacy that is still with us in the attitudes and laws prevalent in Western societies. In time, theologians such as Thomas Aquinas would provide a theological rationale for the prohibition of homosexual acts, and canon lawyers would give the prohibition force in ecclesiastical discipline. “Intolerance” of gays became characteristic of Christianity during the high middle ages when the Church tried to assert greater control over the personal lives of the faithful. ![]() ![]() Boswell, a professor of history at Yale, says that in the early Church there were few sanctions against homosexuality. ![]()
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