Book Review: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by John Boswell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. By John Boswell. Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition; Foreword by Mark D. Jordan. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, Pp. xxvi, 424. $29.00, paper.)

Even though gay marriage is now the law of the land and a majority of Americans support employment and civil rights for LBGTQIA persons, our national rhetoric, many religious bodies, and significant numbers of our citizenry continue to condemn same-sex relationships, often based on religious arguments. Thirty-five years after its original publication in 1980, John Boswell's monumental work remains current, timely and erudite. Negative reviews of the book and its author (who died of AIDS complications in 1994) appeared at the time of the book's publication, even while it was lauded throughout the gay community and won the National Book Award in 1981. One commentator complained that, because Boswell was a "believer" (that is, a devout Roman Catholic), his goal of trying to exonerate "Mother Church" from...