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In this online CLGS Lavender Lunch, Benjamin Brenkert reflects on the future church for LGBTQ+ People and their allies. As a former Jesuit, he proposes the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as a means for people of faith to discern membership in churches that thwart their personal and group flourishing.
Benjamin Brenkert was born in Valley Stream on Long Island in New York. For nearly 10 years he was a Jesuit seminarian in good standing, but he left the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) when several Roman Catholic dioceses fired LGBTQ employees and volunteers from their jobs and assignments. Brenkert is a New York-based writer and therapist; he is also completing his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His first book, A Catechism of the Heart: A Jesuit Missioned to the Laity (Wipf and Stock, 2020), is a memoir and primer on vocation, discernment, and changing one’s way of life all for the greater glory of God.