Yeah.

And he said, "Well, I'd love to do something like this near Tampa," which is where, where he lives.

And so, uh, ultimately, you know, a search for that land, um, is, was, was on.

Uh, the land was found, which is in a location where there's got some undulation and hills in, in Florida, which is not traditional in any way.

Um, and so we have a great piece of property.

Uh, we were fortunate enough to get Tom Doak and Blake Conant, uh, who Blake, uh, I think Tom Doak speaks for himself as one of the best architects in the world.

But Blake has been working under Tom, uh, with the Renaissance Golf Group, and had just finished up or is finishing up with Old Barnwell, where he did a couple of really successful designs there with Brian Schneider.

I love it.

the Bible says about gender and sexuality is still like, have you read it?

And I think this is where I've become quite disappointed with biblical scholarship recently because it feels like in the biblical scholarly world, you can't actually talk about this topic at all unless you affirm a certain kind of normative progressive view.

Yeah.

So seeing this happen with Richard B. Hayes in such a strange way, and various other biblical scholars to tick publishers' boxes so that they can sell academic books.

It just feels like we're losing our capacity as the academy to also represent alternative views.

So one of the things I think I came to after all of this, I came to the realization, I was like, yeah, actually being a celibate gay Christian in a non-repressive way is more intensely queer in queer theological terminology than being in a gay marriage.

And another thing that happened in the academic literature was this new word.

And yet in every case that I know that an evangelical church, not a mainline church, well, they have their own concerns but like if an evangelical church changes to an affirming view in almost I mean maybe a case that I know and I can think of Ted off the top of my head it's dwindled the church has and or even kind of passed out of existence or gone to a full on kind of like you know embracing every heresy known to man but I don't know that's just my anecdotal kind of view that it kind of caught on for a little bit but then hasn't carried on have you has that been your sense or what's been your sense because you do a lot of I mean you interact with a lot of people from different theological traditions when it comes to sexuality

[laughs]

Anyway, but basically after that encounter with my uncle, as I left the room quite, um, irate, he had this vision of me becoming a Christian and being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Um, and sometime later, as he had seen, uh, I ended up in a pub, um, in the gay quarter of Sydney, just near Oxford Street.

Uh, and there was a young filmmaker there, and I asked her, "How did you get your film into the largest short film competition in the world?" And she said to me, "Oh, it was God." And so the same reaction that I had to my uncle, uh, surfaced.

And she said to me, "What do you think about Jesus?" And I said, "Well, you know, he's a great candidate for God if we're going to go there.

But it's human-invented religion that he's God.

Um, and you know, I'm gay and I've read 1 Corinthians 6:9, Leviticus 18, you know, Romans 1, et cetera.

... sort of, yeah, hear how this looks like to-

Yeah

... to hold those things.

And so there was very much a model of radical self-disclosure, like, "I'm gay.

That's liberation.

Deal with it, Christian.

Bye." You know, close the door.

And I, I talk about the problem of self-rejection, that I think what lies at the base of-Our wrestle with these questions is a much larger theme of am I really lovable? Am I really loved? Uh, and when you're told by a whole religious episteme or way of understanding things, no, you're not lovable, or that's the s- at least on the surface that's how it feels, you have to fight your own inner self-rejection, so you have to reject that group.

Yep.