Sed Contra Archive

If you’re looking for Sed Contra, David Morrison’s blog about “A Life Lived Beyond Gay,” you’ve come to the right place.

For more than four years, David Morrison shared his insights publicly, creating a remarkable online community. When he announced in September 2007 that he would delete the blog from the TypePad server, I commented,

David, first of all, thank you for what has been an excellent resource–humane, thought-provoking, wise (usually!), often touching. Those who would caricature our Church’s stance on “Discipleship and Same Sex Attraction,” as you categorize it, can only be confounded by your careful and patient teaching here.

You’ve established this as a “safe space” (to reclaim a buzz-phrase from the theological revisionists) where readers can see that even if they don’t accept the Church’s teaching, they can express doubts and ask questions without immediately getting jumped on as heretics or perverts. First of all they are recognized as people made in the image and likeness of God. Yet at the same time, you insist firmly that the easy answers the world provides to questions about sexual desire just won’t do; people are owed nothing less than the truth, inconvenient as it may sometimes be. Would that all Christian sites showed such charity and clarity towards people who are attached to gay ideology!

Before the site disappeared, David gave permission to anyone who wished to save any of his posts or repost them on our own blogs. I went to some trouble to capture most of the pages, with the intention of eventually setting up a permanent archive online, only to find recently that my own clumsy efforts to archive the site were largely unnecessary, because almost all of Sed Contra was already preserved at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

So here’s where to find almost everything.* The Wayback Machine apparently didn’t capture the last few months of the blog (during which David was writing less frequently in any case), so I’ll hope to eventually put up those pages here. Note: The archive didn’t quite preserve the layout of material, so you may have to scout around on a page to find sidebars and such.

You can read Sed Contra by following the links in the right sidebar under S.C.’s Categories. In particular, I’d suggest looking at the categories Discipleship and Same Sex Attraction, Culture, Discipleship Generally, and Correspondence. (These contain a lot of material, so they may load slowly.) Do take a look at posts for which there are several comments; the dialogues among “Sed Contrarians” gave the site a particularly welcoming tone.

It’s not possible to comment at the Wayback Machine, but I imagine that some readers would like to have their say about some of the Sed Contra posts and comments, so I’m opening up a forum, and we’ll see if maybe some old Sed Contrarians might feel moved to join in a renewed discussion.

I may eventually post a list of links to individual posts that are noteworthy–if you have a favourite, please nominate it in the forum.
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*If you should happen to look at the Wayback Machine’s index page for the site, you’ll see a great table of dates on which it collected data, but note that these are not necessarily the dates on which David posted anything. Moreover, it wasn’t that unusual on Sed Contra (unlike many other blogs) for readers to comment on something long after it was posted, so if you were to try to find a post by going to the next date in the Wayback Machine’s list, you’d miss out on any comments that might have been posted long afterwards. So you’re better off, if you decide to poke around on your own, to start from the most recent archive, June 6, 2007, because TypePad’s internal archive meant that there was a cumulative record of virtually everything that had appeared on the blog. So that’s the most comprehensive set of links and the one I used to generate the S.C.’s Categories list in the right sidebar. My only real reservation about that set of files is that I much preferred David’s original tagline “Notes from a Life Lived Beyond Gay” over the one he replaced it with at the beginning of 2007, “Because Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” It was his blog, though, and I don’t really see it as my place to impose my own editorial preferences in the matter at the expense of making his last few months of material harder to access.