Seduced by Grace: Contemporary Spirituality, Gay experience, and Christian Faith

‘You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced…’ Jeremiah 20:7 In these collected writings from 1998 to 2004, Michael Bernard Kelly invites us into an intimate exploration of the inner wisdom and radical challenge of Christianity. In reflections that take us from the fields of Nicaragua to New York and the ‘War on Terror’; from the joy of erotic pleasure to the challenge of cleansing the church of homophobia, Kelly gives voice to a spirituality of desire grounded in justice and love. Michael Kelly writes with great precision and poignancy of a yearning which everyone shares. A yearning for love, both physical and spiritual. A yearning for completion… - Fiona Capp A potent collection of thoughtful writings … that are at once an acutely accurate critique of the shortcomings of the Church and a poignant testimonial to the heroic spirit that has, at times, invigorated it… - Victor Marsh, White Crane Journal Every chapter in this book is an invitation. Its thoughts and stories carry you over and over again into a deeper place… - Rev Dorothy McRae-McMahon These are the passionate dispatches of a reporter from one of the most hostile - for gay men and women - regimes on earth: the Catholic church. Michael Kelly has come out but stayed in. His indictment of the church is stark but his vision of what it might become has the power to move even hardened atheists… - David Marr