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by Kathy Baldock (Author)
This booklet is a tribute to Rev. David Sheldon Fearon - a gentle, faithful man who lived quietly behind a secret for most of his life, yet whose letters, written in 1959, would one day matter to millions of people he would never meet.
At twenty-one years old, closeted and alone in his first year of seminary, David wrote the only academic challenge to the Revised Standard Version translation team's decision to combine two Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, and render them as "homosexuals" in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. He signed the letter with only his first and middle names, mailed it from a post office box so no one would know, and went back to his studies. He told no one.
For the next sixty years, David kept his secret - serving thirty-five years in ministry in the United Church of Canada, loving his partner Joe, and never once imagining that his letters had survived. He had no way of knowing they were sitting in the Yale archives, waiting.
In 2017, researchers found the letters. In 2018, they found him.
At eighty years old, Rev. David Fearon came out for the first time - and learned that the careful, courageous words he had written alone as a young seminary student had outlasted him, and would now be read by people around the world.
This is the story he never got to tell.
