I started this book with anticipation but finished it, just relieved to be finished. While I really appreciate the need to engage one in relationships with people of the opposite sex and would agree that we lose when we do not. It felt as if Dan was stretching the biblical narrative to fit his position. This seems especially true when he speaks of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

In addition to these concerns, it was just a difficult read. Too many outside sources and writing style that is difficult to follow.

This subject certainly merits further discussion and I would love to see more written on the topic.

Having delved into the subject as a pastor years ago, my comments about Dan’s book are really “structural” rather than “ideational.” For example, I very much appreciate Dan’s extensive use of sources, including finding some very Eastern Orthodox perspectives. He also does a nice and creative job building the major themes in which to explore this issue. All of this provides a solid work, and one that’s been needed for a long time, especially in the Protestant evangelical community. It’s also the biggest drawback–I just got weary of reading strings of quotations. I did an experiment: I randomly chose several pages, hoping to find one without a single quotation mark. I failed. Plus, no bibliography? Thinking about provocative issues is hard enough–now I have to search through small type to figure out where these ideas are coming from and where to go from here. This didn’t keep me away from finishing this very nice work—nor should it you–but it did leave me feeling weary, and wishing I had read more of Dan himself through a better synthesis of ideas. — Philokalius

However, like any bibliophile such as me, I seldom encounter books with this particular subject and I wanted to have some answers to this question: “Was it possible to really have it all?”

That in today’s mixed up world and differences in culture is there a thing? Regardless being a Christian or not that you can truly enjoy such deep friendship with the opposite sex?

What was the Author trying to convince us? Now…is the time to be more open-minded that despite being engulf by the rapid changes brought by technology through text, email, chat and social networking that there is a yearning for more.

To fully embrace the concept of “intimacy” of cross-sex friendships without leading to something more romantic or ending up in bed.

I can truly relate to this kind of thesis. As I enjoy my friendships with men, my best friend used to be a guy and it didn’t affect my marriage at all. Maybe I was lucky or maybe my husband and I are liberal minded. We both felt that it is healthy that we have friends that we can enjoy each other’s company without the headaches of suspicion,

To be it more plainly “Our world’s don’t exclusively revolved around each other”.

Although in some conservative society this might be hard to understand, much more if its a dominant Christian nation like mine.

However, this happens almost everywhere and the Author have provided us with enough examples from the bible and other sources to prove his point.

This book might not come us revolutionary that can create so much impact enough to change lives but it is a worthy attempt to convince us that developing deeper friendships with the opposite sex is attainable without the sex part.

Like any human relationships, trust and respect takes time but Dan Brennan takes a bit further and it will enlighten any Christians or Non-Christians alike.

Here’s the thing though, I would much rather discuss Brennan’s side points than his main points. I feel this way for a couple of reasons. First of all, intellectually, spiritually, and theologically I think Brennan is right on. However, I feel like he missed his mark on the focus when we speak culturally, emotionally, or in terms of effecting positive change in our church. Let me explain.

What our culture needs right now is a broader and more fleshed out idea of intimacy that does not necessarily involve genitalia. However, this is a side point. What our culture needs right now is to be critiqued for the over-sexualization of intimacy. However, this is a side point. I am glad Brennan includes these side points, they are almost what make the book worth reading. Still, the main point is that men and women can be just friends, but in our culture even the idea of friendship is slipping away…

Emotionally, Brennan holds out some tantalizing visons, but fails to engage at all in how individuals, who are damaged by our cultures distorted views of intimacy, can works towards these visions.

Finally, in terms of the church, Brennan has a lot to say about the problems we have caused. However, he completely ignores principals of change. As an aside, I find most books do. The cynical side of me wants to say that this is because controversy sells. I don’t doubt many authors have much purer motives. However, read any book on helping people change and you will find things like “move slowly” and “speak gently.” I am not saying Brennan should not say what he said; but where is the humility and grace? Where is the principle of the stronger brother submitting to the weaker, which we find so prevalent in the apostle Paul?

In the end, this is an incredibly well researched book, a fairly well written book, and, perhaps, a poorly aimed book. 3.5 out of 5 stars, conditionally recommended.

Now that I am older, I know that this story I heard as a child is a myth. No group of people have 100 words for snow. But if there was one concept in life which is deserving of such an honour, it is love.

In his book, Sacred Union, Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan writes about how through the history of humanity, love has come to take on many forms. One of the least accepted forms in society is the male-female, non-sexual, relationship. This book highlights this under-developed, often misunderstood form of love in a world which desperately needs its strength.

As most “emergent” literature is today, this book takes aim at conservative Christianity, whose views of relationships and sexuality is behind the times. And while Brennan does a good job of keeping this to a minimum, while highlighting the numerous denominations who do a better job at male-female, non-sexual relationships, it is a good book to read if you are unsure as to what should be the role of people of the opposite gender in your life.

My only disappointment with this book is that it seemed to minimize the difficulties as well as the dangers of this type of friendship. In a modern world which focuses on the shallow view of human sexuality, we need direction on how to form these positive, Christ affirming relationships in such a way that sexual intercourse is not the desired outcome. (I hope this might be addressed and developed in a second book!)

Pick this book up… its worth it to help begin to change the world to have a more positive view of love, relationships and sexuality!

Dan Brennan deals with the issue of cross-gendered friendship in his book, “Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions.” His proposal is that the Evangelical community has, by and large, allowed culture to dictate the terms of what it means to be both a friend and sexual. Brennan suggests that we have adopted a view of sexuality that is far more Freudian than it is biblical. I have to say I agree.

The truth is that we are called to a life of redemption, a life of “shalom,” and Brennan argues correctly that this must characterize ALL that we do, including how we interact with the opposite sex. He makes the case that is not only okay to be a close, intimate friend with a member of the opposite sex who isn’t your spouse or who you have no romantic intentions with, but that it is actually necessary, especially for the health of our other relationships, particularly our marriages.

The current approach to cross-gendered friendship, Brennan argues, is rooted in both fear and in a myth of romance that we have created, where only one person can be all we ever need. Quite frankly, that is an unhealthy approach for any relationship, as no single person can be or should be expected to be all for one person. Brennan points out that we are called to become one as brothers and sisters in Christ, and that is not relegated merely to marriage.

One of the most helpful chapters in the book deals with historical relationships in the church that were mutually edifying and beneficial that also happened to be cross-gendered. It’s helpful because we normally only tell stories of danger and fear when it comes to these types of relationships, but we never focus on the stories where God is restoring both people to God through each other. In another portion of the book, Brennan takes a look at two passages of scripture- one about Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden after his resurrection, that has huge implications for male-female relations; the other about the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair and tears. These two explorations alone are worth getting the book for.

This book asks the question; what would happen if we started over with a Biblical definition instead of our society’s definition? There is a lot of blame, if not all the blame, placed on Freud, who definitely had mommy issues. Freud sexualized all relationships, both cross-gender and same gender. Thanks Sigmund!

This book goes on to describe a bit of Church history and give several examples of purely platonic friendships that would be looked at with great suspicion in our current culture. But simply because we have issues does not mean that everyone has issues, right?

The question should be asked; if we view marriage as the epitome of relationships, where does that leave single people? With nods to Jon Acuff and his view of the Church and single-hood, we can’t just ask this for single adults. Are we saying that children and teenagers are incomplete until their parents let them out of the house to find a mate? Are we to forever segregate boys and girls from each other until they are mature enough to pursue a marital relationship?

Dan does a great job of making references to data throughout history, even including these couple of gems when discussing how men view women. Quoting Nancy Tuana, “a woman left uncontrolled was one of the greatest dangers to mankind.” So felt the Greeks. Even Aristotle believed that women should not be left to their own. Something about great destruction and damage left in their wake. Those silly philosophers. Dan balances it all out by showing how Jesus, as usual, was ahead of His time. Ahead of ours as well.

To me, it seems obvious once it is pointed out, but how much of my married adult life has been lived blind to this reality. Marriage is a choice. It’s not the better choice. It’s not the inevitable choice. It’s simply a choice. But in the midst of redefining terms and changing our view of the opposite sex and appropriate friendships, let’s make one thing clear. I still believe all girls have cooties.

Dan Brennan does approach just those kinds of concerns (without my rather jaded point of view)with compassion and care. He walks the reader through a clear understanding of various points of view and the origins/basis of them. He also gives us a clear foundation based on Scripture of where he believes we should rest as a people of faith.

This is a book about marriage and friendships, it deals with the issues of sex calmly and reasonably, and he refuses to deal with the idea of a loving, non-sexual relationship as something dangerous or alien to Christian thinking. While it seems clear to me that it is aimed primarily at the concerns of certain parts of the evangelical branch of the faith family I think it provides a wonderful rationale for all Christian understanding of friendship between genders. The argument is that the church is less when we limit the interaction between all of God’s children.
Also that the other approach to sex, friendship and gender is essentially one that traps everyone in an immature place of development.

Might make a great book for newlyweds or soon to be weds to consider as well as young people.

I personally have had many woman friends over the years and one in particular that was during a time when I needed a friend most of all. It was a friendship that strengthened my faith and pushed me to think of my relationship with Christ as more than just private and personal. However, throughout those times, I never could fully legitimize these relationships (in my mind) because of societal taboos. This book explained to my head what my heart had known all along.

What an awesome book… I recommend it unstintingly!

There’s another theory of beauty: beauty as excess, beauty as transgression. Sometimes this aesthetics claims a corner on the market for beauty as transcendent, but I won’t buy into this monopoly. Beauty is what we make of our limitations, not just our escape from them. Phrased differently, we see beauty when we see the truth of our limitations, see them in a different light, see them in light of the resurrection.

One way of describing Dan Brennan’s Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship between Men and Women is to say it locates friendship (specifically cross-sex friendships) within these competing dynamics of beauty. On the first page Brennan writes,
This book makes a simple claim: stories of paired cross-sex friendship love are journeys toward communion with God and our neighbor in the Christian story. In the new creation, men and women are not limited to stark contrasts where we must choose between romantic passion in marriage or inappropriate sex/infidelity. Chaste, but powerfully close friendships between the sexes stir our curiosity and resist formulaic gender roles in marriage, friendship, and society.
Beautiful cross-sex relationships, he argues, should not be bounded by the aesthetic ideology of excess. Relational beauty, it turns out, is a matter of balance, not sheerly of orgasm or roses and candy hearts.

Brennan points to Freud as marking the tipping point where sexuality became utterly genitalized and the romantic myth gained decisive ascendancy in Western culture. The romantic myth, Brennan asserts, is the consequence of “idealizing romantic passion as the unique, one-and-only, exclusive form of love between a man and woman.” Every relationship is on a trajectory toward nookie, and only in a sustained and actively sexual relationship can a human person hope to find true fulfilment.

Evangelical churches uphold this metanarrative, even if in mirror reverse of wider culture. Through staff policies enforcing strict boundaries on mingling with the opposite sex and church singles mixers–even through battles for a constitutional definition of marriage–Evangelicaldom enshrines the paired and exclusive romantic male-female relationship as constitutive of Christian blessedness. In large part, the book as a whole emerges as a reaction and response to these narrow parameters of “appropriate behaviour.”

If Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions remained only a theoretical/theological reflection on friendship in what strikes me as a Cappadocian key, it would be a decent book. Brennan’s blog, Faith Dance, would lead me to expect nothing less than this from him. But where this book shines most is in its extended discussions of cross-sex friendships throughout church history and of Jesus’ example in cross-sex relationships.

As I read the first forty or fifty pages, I nodded along with Brennan’s critique of the culture’s and the church’s reduction of cross-sex relationship to parts and hormones, their exclusion of legitimate friendships. But hints and comments about tracing the church’s history–its other history–of cross-sex friendships left me eager for chapters to come. They were well worth the wait.

Highlights: a long meditation on Jesus’ friendship with Mary Magdalene and the significance of the first resurrection appearance in John 20; a similarly lengthy chunk of text devoted to the woman who anoints and kisses Jesus’ feet in Luke 7. The book may be worth reading if only for these two discussions (though the whole is well worth a read).

Brennan makes a provocative case for Jesus as a forerunner in deep, embodied, and chastely sexual cross-sex friendships. This option has been suppressed in church history and named repressed by contemporary church and culture, but we can still find beautiful female-male friendships among those who follow Jesus’ example.

I am praising Brennan’s Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions pretty highly, but I have my critiques. I’ll voice two:

1) While Brennan’s argument is compelling, it is poorly strung together. The book could have used a bit more editing, time spent shaping a succession of brilliant paragraphs and strings of citations into the clear and concise development of an unfolding thesis. There were more than a few moments when I had to re-read a page to puzzle out its contribution to the book’s thesis. This said, I would not hesitate to assign this text for a reflection essay in a seminary course on pastoral practice or Christian discipleship. If the argument is hard to trace, it remains well worth the energy expended to do so.

2) Brennan leaves wholly unaddressed questions and implications for friendship in a cultural space of diverse sexual orientations. What does it mean for me to be close friends with someone identifying as gay? How should those within the LGBTQ community understand same-sex and cross-sex friendships? Surely we can’t just invert the book, substituting same-sex for cross-sex where the romantic metanarrative is told differently. But how do we locate faithful friendship and subversive cultural praxis in our cultural and ecclesial moment?

Perhaps Brennan felt this book would already make enough waves in Evangelical circles, that opening to a discussion of sexuality as such might capsize the vessel. Perhaps. It’s not good manners to criticize a book for what it fails to do. However, there are times when a fault of omission speaks nearly as loudly as one of commission. This is one such instance.

In Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan opens a space for regarding cross-sex friendships as masterpieces of balance rather than as moments in a work of romantic excess. By doing so, the field is cleared for cross-sex friendship as an end-in-itself (or, we might say, cross-sex friendship’s own meaning in the truth of the resurrection).

I like this. It neither chucks the Christian system of sexual ethics as a whole (by writing friendship as a field of excess) nor capitulates to a reductive field for friendship (by demarcating its limits with rules and policies).

To say this differently: On my kitchen table I have this week’s yield from a local CSA. There is zucchni and new potatoes and something I thought was celery but that a friend informed was swiss chard. Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions is like community-supported agriculture. It does not give up the fight for a more just food system, resigning itself to push the cart through the big-box grocery store’s “Fresh Produce” section. Yet, unlike some of my anarcho-primitivist friends, it does not demand a secession from contemporary society and reversion to hunting and gathering. Instead it opts for a third way: close, deep, embodied and spiritual, sexual yet chaste cross-sex friendships. That is beautiful.

I came to this book already agreeing with Brennan’s basic thesis, that it is both possible and necessary to have deep friendships, whether or not you’re married, with people of both sexes. I’ve never spent time thinking the opposite was true. If I had, perhaps this book would have had greater appeal to me, but as I read it, I couldn’t help but think: “Did this book really need to be written?” In fact, I felt very strongly that Brennan not only doesn’t really say anything new, but he doesn’t do a very good job saying it, and may have hurt his own case in writing this book. He seems to spend the entire book arguing against a vauge “conservative” monolith who has condemned not only cross-sex friendship in marriage but friendship in general!

First of all, he uses very sexualized language to describe friendships outside of marriage. In an attempt to widen an understanding of sexuality that separates itself from Freud, Brennan uses language like passion, physical pleasure, and even sexuality to describe friendship. The only major distinction he makes between friendship and marriage is “genital sex” as he calls it. While I don’t fully disagree with this use of terms, I’m not sure he’s helping his cause by using language that most people cannot distinguish from romance.

Second, the book is poorly argued and constructed. For example, in chapter 4, he introduces 12 “themes from Scripture” to help illustrate that “male-female intimacy in friendship is an expression of God’s heart for deepening reconciliation betweenmen and women in Christ” (p 73). Of Brennan’s 12 themes, several of them are themes or arguments from books, sometimes not even referencing Scripture. There are several grammatical errors, awkward sentence structure, and poor reasoning. The endorsements on the back cover prominently display a quote from Mike Morell, formatted differently from the others and just seem to have missed an editor’s pen. Overall, the book itself appears more like a low-budget, self-published book by a not-so-great writer.

I don’t mean to make entirely scathing remarks. The book has some high points, especially the second half of chapter 4. He makes some good statements about “sexual shalom” and the sexual theology of the church, some things that I’ve said myself in another post about agape, eros, and philos, though I think he’s got it backwards. He says everything is an example of eros, whereas I say that everything strives to be agape.

The final problem with this book is that it is an example of poor exegesis. Brennan tries to get Scripture to support his thesis and doesn’t do a good job illuminating what the passages he’s using are actually saying. Amazingly, the entire Bible is about male-female friendships! Who knew?! Instead of intelligently suggesting that there are things we can draw from Jesus’ interactions with women, he attempts to make the Gospels a story of cross-sex friendship. He makes claims about Jesus’ intent without acknowledging the role of the author or perhaps the narrative function of a lot of the stories he tries to make use of. Many of the passages he use can support his thesis, but he doesn’t do a compelling job showing this to anyone with a critical eye to methodology.

Overall, my major gripe with the book is that it is poorly written as a published thesis. He’s well researched, in a sense, but I’ve never heard of almost all of his sources when it comes to sexuality. I would recommend it to someone who wouldn’t really raise a fuss about writing style like I did, and who didn’t generally agree with the thesis at the beginnning. Not sure this book needed to be written, especially by this author.