Voting often is seen as a righteous act, or even a moral duty, and churches have a long history of encouraging people to vote. The Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations has launched an extensive “Vote Faithfully” toolkit before Election Day in November to help churches and dioceses in the United States encourage voting and otherwise engage with secular governance.

The toolkit includes six bulletin inserts and graphics sized for social media or use in newsletters, and all materials are available in English and Spanish. The bulletin inserts are intended for use beginning September 15, two days before National Voter Registration Day. Other inserts describe how to vote, why it is important, and how to detect misinformation in political campaigns.

The office has produced an Episco-Pols public policy podcast since early 2023, and the most recent episodes focus on voting. “We have this privilege of living in a democratic republic, where our voices are heard, so we have a chance to weigh in,” said Rebecca Linder Blachly, director of government relations, in the episode introducing the topic. “The planning, as we approach November, needs to happen now.”

The increased incidence of violent political rhetoric “raises the importance of embodying healthy civic engagement,” said Alan Yarborough, who as church relations officer leads the election engagement effort.

Separately, a brother at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist is developing a video series to be released weekly beginning in September, culminating in an in-person and online vigil on Election Night. The purpose is “to explore the Christian call to engage politically, how we do that faithfully in 21st-century democracy, while committed to God and the upbuilding of the common good,” said Br. Lucas Hall.

The videos will feature conversations with guest speakers, and seek to reinforce that there is a “meaningful vocation or call for the church as a collective and for us as individual Christians to to reckon with questions in the political realm,” he said.

“There’ll be one final video that comes out after Election Day,” he said. In his interviews with each speaker, he asks, “How would you encourage people listening to this to think and to act and to pray with these political questions that we’ve raised?”

St. Stephen’s in Richmond, the largest church in the Diocese of Virginia, is very engaged in political discourse, but it stops short of urging parishioners to vote. Rector John Rohrs said the parish has large contingents of supporters of both major presidential candidates, and he worries that a get-out-the-vote effort might be seen as too political.

He knows many parishioners will be upset after the election, so he’s planning a “Week of Compassion” beginning the Sunday after the election, “creating a number of opportunities for our congregation members to engage in active ministry and service in the community together, all ages, you know, some daytime events, some evening events, some weekend events, intergenerational opportunities,” he said. Specific plans are still in development, but are likely to include volunteer work in the parish’s food ministries, and volunteer construction or maintenance efforts with community partners.

The church will continue a tradition of creating “turkey boxes” to donate at Thanksgiving, as an intergenerational effort. “One of the things the children have done is make cards or little pieces of art to put in each box and to sort of send prayers and well wishes,” said the Rev. Cate Anthony, associate rector.

Leading to the election, she will lead a weekly “Sacramental Citizenship” workshop based on a program she developed as an Episcopal Church Foundation fellow.

“The program looks to help participants form their own sense of personal ethics, using the Baptismal Covenant, which is, I think, an ethical document,” she said. “We use the Baptismal Covenant to sort of parse out personal values.”

Then the program applies those values to hot-button issues. “So we talked about war, climate change, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, specifically focusing on marriage,” she said. The group will meet on Wednesdays, and the meeting on the day after the election will be devoted primarily to prayer.

“What I tell people is, do you want to know what your vestry is really made of? If you want to know, throw a half million dollars in the middle of the table and say, ‘so, I think we shouldn’t take this money. How about you?’” said the Very Rev. Laurie Garramone, the longtime rector of St. John’s Episcopal in Johnstown, a town of 8,000 people about 45 miles northwest of Albany.

The funds were intended to improve the infrastructure for the church’s food ministries. The people of St. John’s had operated a food pantry and a Sunday lunch program in their cramped, poorly insulated basement for more than three decades. The narrow concrete stairway deterred people with mobility issues, and the kitchen equipment was 30 years old.

So they bought a building across the street in 2013 — a three-story structure that formerly housed both a YMCA and a post office. The purchase price of $80,000 sounds like quite a bargain, but the building needed a lot of work: a new roof, new windows, accessibility improvements, flooring, plumbing, and more.

The initial $1.5 million cost for the project ballooned over the years to $2.4 million, because of delays, fundraising challenges, and pandemic-induced inflation. But the food pantry held a ribbon-cutting ceremony August 5, after moving into the wheelchair-accessible first floor of the building now known as One Church Street. The lunch program is still across the street in the church basement, but if the necessary funds can be raised, it will eventually move into the elevator-accessible second floor of the renovated building.

So why did St. John’s take a pass on $500,000 from New York State? “We had to turn it down because the requirement was that we could not do any ministry in this space for seven years,” Garramone said.

The decision was not made lightly. “We actually brought in a Christian arbitrator to sit with us as a vestry, to ask us what the goals were for the building,” Garramone said. One Church Street also houses the church offices — “there’s no separation of church and food.” The vestry started off sharply divided, but eventually agreed unanimously to turn down the grant.

“The $2.4 million was raised from, you know, the $5 that somebody threw in a jar all the way up to the $250,000 that we got from a local grant,” Garramone said. The parish raised $1,000 by asking people to bring their change jars to church.

“And one man who comes to the meal every Sunday, he said to me, I want to write a check to your program, because my friend Paul can’t come downstairs, and I want Paul to have this meal,” Garramone said.

It wasn’t a large check, but the widower’s mite will go toward the additional $1.5 million needed for phase two: renovating the second floor with a modern kitchen and a spacious dining area. St. John’s hopes to rent the third floor to a nonprofit organization that can pay to renovate the space to the group’s specific needs.

Food for the food pantry and meal program comes primarily from the Northeast Regional Food Bank in Latham, an Albany suburb. The programs are run by a roster of 150 volunteers drawn from St. John’s and from community groups throughout the area.

Garramone is hard-core about this feed-the-hungry ministry. To develop her leadership skills and network with like-minded people, she pursued a doctor of ministry degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She graduated in May, with a thesis titled “A Theology of Nourishment: From Basement to Banquet Hall.”

Her thesis describes why Fulton County, where Johnstown is located, needs the services St. John’s and One Church Street provide. “Fulton County’s self-reported food insecurity among adults stands at 25%, which means that 1 in 4 adults identifies as having limited or uncertain access to nutritious food. This is more than double the national food insecurity rate,” she wrote.

“Statistically, our Pantry numbers have exploded.  In the month of January of 2020, prior to the pandemic, our Pantry served 98 people in a total of 63 households. In January of 2024, we served the highest number of people: 644 people in 242 households, an increase of 557%, and a 284% percent increase in households served.”

“I came to ordination a little bit later in life, in my 40s,” Garramone said, after a career as an English professor. “And when I came into ministry, I did not know that we shouldn’t do big projects, or that we should be nervous about them,” she said.

“It is in fact possible to raise $1.5 million — and we will do it, on behalf of the kingdom of God. So I would love to hear more churches ask, why not?”

Are you a cradle Episcopalian?
I grew up Presbyterian. I was teaching at the University of Scranton [Pennsylvania], and at the time, my wife was a [United Church of Christ] pastor. We both made our way to the Episcopal Church while we were there, largely drawn by liturgy and sacrament. That was something that we missed, but we didn’t know we were missing it until we started getting connected to the Episcopal Church in Scranton.

After we had our first child, my wife wanted to work part time. The UCC churches in the area, none of them were big enough to have a second person. You know, the only way to be part time was to be a solo pastor who is part time. And we know that doesn’t actually exist. You can’t be part time if you’re the only person.

You can have a part-time salary!
Exactly. Friends of ours said they were looking for a half-time youth minister at [Church of the Epiphany in Glenburn Township, a Scranton suburb]. She could spend a little more time at home with our first child and work half time at the Episcopal Church. As a Presbyterian teaching in a Catholic Jesuit university, it was inevitable that I would become Episcopalian, and that’s what happened.

Jesuits do education really well. Right from the start, it was very clear that Jesuit education is about the formation of the whole person. And you don’t get that at every undergraduate institution. Seminaries, by their nature, are concerned about formation of the whole person. So coming here to Southwest was not a big transition in that respect.

Has Seminary of the Southwest been growing in recent years?
When you’re working with relatively small numbers, there can be fairly big fluctuations from year to year. We have been hovering between, say, 110 and 120 students for at least the last five years. Of those, roughly 75 are students in our counseling program, and we have usually somewhere between 30 and 40 in the M.Div. [master of divinity]. And then we’ve got a handful of students in two other programs: a master of arts in religion, and a master’s in spiritual direction. Those are both small programs, but they speak to important things that we care about.

So it’s been steady, basically.
Last year we had 19 new M.Divs. Looks like this year we’ll have nine new M.Divs. So year to year, it can be very different, but averaging out to around 15 is usually where we land.

How many of your students are residential?
All the M.Div. students are residential. We do not have any online or hybrid M.Div. programs, but we do have our Iona Collaborative program. It was originally founded [in 2012] to provide resourcing for local formation of priests and deacons, but has expanded since then to become much more attentive to lay formation. Iona has been our way of trying to figure out, how do you do theological formation for folks who can’t come to a residential seminary? Iona doesn’t offer a degree. We offer a certificate of completion, and the final assessment of students happens at the diocesan level, so we leave that to the deans of the program and the bishops and commissions on ministry. That’s been our way to expand our reach beyond those who can physically be on campus.

The gold standard of priest-making is the three-year residential program, and there’s an obvious benefit to being in community with other people who are wrestling with the same kinds of things as you look toward a career in the priesthood. Garwood Anderson [former dean of Nashotah House] certainly favors residential, but says even for people who have the will and the interest, they can’t necessarily make the math work in terms of the cost and the lack of full-time opportunities.
The Episcopal Church is going to need, and increasingly has, a mixed economy of clergy formation. I think we’ll live with that mixed economy for quite some time. We continue to need residential seminaries, but we also need other options for people who can’t get to a residential program. Maybe it’s a spouse or family that makes it impossible to move. Sometimes it’s finances. Sometimes their goal really is bivocational ministry, and it doesn’t make any sense to leave your job if your goal is, in the end, to be bivocational.

At the same time, I really believe residential seminary provides something that you can’t provide in online and hybrid programs. You have people living together, people who are involved in a common life throughout the day. It’s life in the classroom, but it’s also meals together. It’s also chapel together. It’s social time together. It’s events on campus. It’s getting together and going into Austin and going to a concert or going to a show, or going to a lecture at the University of Texas, or taking advantage of something happening at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. Being in physical proximity with one another and with the sorts of resources that you can have surrounding a seminary makes for opportunities for formation and growth that can’t happen in the same way when you’re online. So I think we need both.

I think residential formation is always going to be an important part of how we help students create that pattern of holy living that helps them embody priestly formation. The challenge of online and hybrid programs is figuring out how that piece works. We all spent a lot of time teaching online during COVID, and we found ways to make that as good as it could possibly be. And I can’t tell you the level of relief our faculty had when they got to go back in a classroom and physically be present with their students.

Are you going to continue teaching as president?
I’ve taught the core ethics courses for the M.Div. program, and I’ve also taught ethics for the counseling students. As president, I’ll cut back on the teaching a little bit, but I can’t imagine not being in the classroom.

One of the things I saw in the announcement of your appointment was your research on the ethics of trans identity. It’s a potentially controversial topic. Tell me something interesting about the ethics of trans identity.
The wider public conversation around sexuality and gender issues shifted after the Supreme Court made its decision about same-sex marriage. A lot of the energy and conversation shifted to transgender issues, and there was not a lot of good theological reflection that I could find on transgender questions. I felt there was a gap to be filled, so I started working on that. What I try to do in my work across the board is to start by listening really well to the people I disagree with, and trying to figure out what it is about their position that leads them to make these sorts of statements or have this kind of stand. What’s important to them?

Genesis describes the creation of male and female, [implying] these are always clear, distinct categories, and any sense of in-between is ruled out by the way the creation story is narrated. What I’ve tried to do is explore the possibilities of the in-betweenness of things. I want to affirm the witness that we’re receiving from transgender Christians, but I also need, as a theologian, as a Christian, to be able to test that with my faith and see how this can make theological sense for us. Is there space within our theological understanding for this witness to find a place?

That’s the question — what’s the answer?
Yes! I think there is. In a scriptural understanding of what it means to be a human being, there are all sorts of ways we can grow and change. Some of those changes are the development of what God planted in us as seeds of our flourishing, and some of those changes are redemptive work of fixing and transforming things that are broken within us. I think trans people are no different in that respect.

What do you want the readers of The Living Church to know about you, or about the seminary, that I haven’t asked you about? And what gives you hope?
The seminary is working on building Beloved Community. This is Episcopal Church language for the racial justice and reconciliation work that we want to be doing. But it’s bigger than just that. It goes to broader questions around ethnicity and sexuality or other ways in which we do, or do not, create a space of belonging for those who are different from ourselves. We have taken very seriously our calling to model a space of holy belonging for everyone who becomes a part of this community: faculty, staff, and students.

Part of what gives me hope is that I see us doing that well. It’s an ongoing process. We’re really concerned about polarization and really concerned to be a place that models good conversation across theological and political difference. We don’t want to be a one-note seminary where we assume everybody is either going to line up in a conservative way or line up in a liberal way.

When our students go back to their various parish settings, some of those places lean more conservative, some lean more liberal. We want them to have the resources for a rich and vital and theological conversation that affirms everyone’s voice, and also affirms some basic things about being a place where we respect the dignity of every human being.

Consternation ensued. Ecclesiastical charges were filed. They were derided as “11 little priestesses, all in a row.”

Fifty years later, almost to the day, the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, one of the 11, stood in the pulpit of Philadelphia Cathedral on July 28 to celebrate what she called “a momentous movement,” shared with “women struggling still today to be recognized and celebrated as the religious leaders which women have always been from the beginning.”

“The Philadelphia ordinations signaled that our neighbors are those left standing outside the gates of our ‘business as usual’ — in this case, women left out of the priesthood,” she said. “And so we were called to stand with them, for them, and — a few of us — as them. A few were called to encourage others by being audacious ourselves, not taking no for an answer.”

Quoting the late Rev. Suzanne Hiatt, a fellow member of the 11 who had been the event’s primary organizer, Heyward said the church is often “the caboose on the justice train, waiting to be rear-ended by the movements for justice,” even as it hears “a collective call to be a liberation church.”

Heyward declared that Christians today live amid a “vast harvest of trouble and fear,” citing issues like growing economic inequality, the war in Gaza, and restrictions on access to abortion.”

“This happens in every generation, where most of us have to trouble to resist the fear-based impulse to keep our heads down and our voices muted, so that no one will ask us — you and me — to take sides publicly in the ongoing tension, always fierce and always frightening.”

Heyward praised the Rev. Emily Hewitt, another of the 11 who was present in the cathedral, and the four other women who were ordained with them who are still alive, and who she said were watching the service from home.

She noted that they stood upon the shoulders of other women who had answered God’s call, including three women earlier ordained to the Anglican priesthood in Hong Kong, and those who served as deaconesses and in religious orders.

Preaching at Washington National Cathedral on the same day, the Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of New York, praised the Philadelphia 11’s decision to be ordained publicly, as a large group, and following the traditions they had received.

“They could have gone off the grid and written their own liturgical service. They could have held the service at a gymnasium or in a school auditorium. They could have had other priests or lay people who supported them say, ‘We see you as priests, and so you are priests.’

“But the service was held at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate. There were four bishops present, three of whom did the laying on of hands, as is the custom. The women all signed the oath of conformity and the bishops led the service from the Book of Common Prayer — believe it or not, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

“People can call these ordinations irregular until the cows come home, but I say, ‘They did it by the book.’ They did not let the principalities and powers take their own tradition away from them. They claimed the Episcopal Church at a time when the church, institutionally speaking, was treating them as a problem the church hoped would go away. What a blessing they have been to us,” she said.

In Glasspool’s diocese, parishes were encouraged to have “A Woman at Every Altar” on Sunday, July 28, in celebration of the anniversary. During his visitation at the Church of the Advocate in the Bronx, Bishop Matthew Heyd invited the Rev. Filomena Servillon to celebrate the Eucharist.

In pastoral letters and statements on social media, many female bishops and priests offered words of gratitude to the women who presented themselves for ordination 50 years ago.

The Rt. Rev. Lucinda Ashby, Bishop of El Camino Real, noted that she had been ordained as a priest when churches were celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the event.

Ashby said she didn’t pay much attention to those commemorative events. “That’s because I took it for granted.  Because I could take it for granted. That was the gift these women gave me,” she said.

“They not only had to articulate their call to a church that needed to hear it, but the women were also consistently balancing their call with the right to be called. I have not had to deal with the issue of my ‘right’ to ordained ministry, thank God. In my journey, I have had the privilege, because of the women who came before me, to hone in on my call to ordained ministry and turn it over, deepen it, and learn from it. I could explore the concept of authority given to me by God without having to respond to a questioning of that by others because of my gender — or at least seldom having to do that.”

Just over half a century ago, there were no female priests in the Episcopal Church. Today, 53 women have been elected bishops of the church. One — Katharine Jefferts Schori — was elected primate in 2006.

And the first female bishop-to-be was in the altar party when the Philadelphia 11 were ordained at Church of the Advocate. Barbara C. Harris, then a laywoman and the senior warden at the church, served as crucifer. In 1988, she was elected Bishop Suffragan of Massachusetts.

The church that 50 years ago heaped scorn on these women now takes steps to establish a feast day in their honor. Resolution C023, passed on first reading at the 81st General Convention last month, establishes propers for The Ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, to be celebrated on July 29. The feast day will be added to the calendar if it is passed on second reading at the next General Convention in 2027.

In a related article on Covenant, longtime TLC contributor the Rev. Lawrence Crumb analyzes some of the misunderstandings that have sprung up about the historic event.

Episcopal News Service reports that screenings and other events marking the anniversary weekend were held in multiple dioceses throughout the church. Further in-person screenings will be available for scheduling, a scheduled basis, and the film’s website features a three-minute trailer.

Back in 1974, Heyward was quoted in The Living Church: “I believe this kind of action will be seen as having been necessary.” Eventually, the Episcopal Church agreed.

Their candor has been costly in some cases. One priest was abruptly fired by her bishop and forbidden to have any contact with her vestry or congregation. Another suddenly left one of the largest parishes in the country without explanation, after proposing a book study on the topic. At least two other priests have renounced their ordination vows to escape ecclesiastical discipline.

This is not a previous era’s war over homosexuality, but rather a present-day struggle over polyamory — “many loves.” A broader term is “consensual nonmonogamy” — relationships where everyone involved knows about and consents to a lack of exclusivity in sexual or romantic expression.

Of course, any discussion of polyamory in a Christian context immediately bumps up against the Seventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Episcopal priests vow at their ordination to “do your best to pattern your life … in accordance with the teachings of Christ, so that you may be a wholesome example to your people.” Marital fidelity is also prominent in New Testament texts about the qualifications for ministry (1 Tim. 3:2, Titus 1:6).

A flexible approach to marriage vows may be considered a personal matter for politicians and others in the secular world, but it has long been grounds for discipline for priests and bishops. More about the Seventh Commandment later.

On July 21, three former Episcopal priests shared their experiences in an online conversation titled “The High Cost of Love: Polyamory, Coming Out, and Religious Trauma.”

Kerlin Richter was rector of St. David of Wales in Portland, Oregon, when she told her bishop that she and her husband were in an open relationship. “I was fired immediately from my job,” she said. “I was not allowed to say goodbye to my congregation. I was not allowed to speak publicly. At that point, I still had an absolutely irrational optimism that I was going to hold on to my ordination, and started to fight.”

Richter has a 20-year-old child with her husband, and a 17-month-old baby with another partner. After a year in what she described as “an incredibly abusive” Title IV disciplinary process, she gave up, and renounced her vows. Her former bishop, the Rt. Rev. Diana Akiyama, is on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Sara Lynn Shisler Goff was ordained in 2011, lives in Hawaii with her wife, and identifies as bisexual. Her departure from ordained ministry was less confrontational. “After a decade in ministry, and from my own process of inquiry and self discovery, I was like, Oh, I think I might actually not be monogamous. What does that mean?”

She said the diocese had a don’t-ask, don’t-tell approach to alternate family structures, but eventually the bishop told the clergy he was going to establish a policy. “So if that is now the thing, then I’m going to use this as my opportunity to exit,” she said.

Colin Chapman — who was a classmate of Richter’s at General Theological Seminary — came to polyamory through his wife’s sexual exploration with a female friend. “Then that relationship grew into something that I don’t think we ever thought would happen,” he said. The three of them have purchased a house together in New Hampshire, where they are raising four children — three from Chapman’s 18-year marriage to his wife, and the biological child of their partner. Chapman said little about the manner of his leaving the church — only that he renounced his vows after he decided he could no longer hide his relationship.

The Rev. Mike Kinman did not participate in the conversation, but expressed strong support for two of the former priests in a long Facebook post in advance of the discussion. Earlier in July, Kinman abruptly resigned from his eight-year rectorship at All Saints Pasadena, a famously progressive congregation that is by far the largest Episcopal church in the Diocese of Los Angeles, and one of the largest in the country.

His departure has been shrouded in mystery. The wardens announced his resignation on July 3, and he preached his final sermon at All Saints four days later. Subsequent communications described the process for finding a new rector, but provided no reason for Kinman’s departure.

Kinman did not respond to multiple requests for comment. His Facebook page has been lit up for weeks with questions and speculation. Some posters have indicated it may have something to do with the cancellation of a musical event after some of the music was described in a culturally insensitive way.

His own post promoting the polyamory discussion suggests a different possible explanation.

“Several months ago, I offered the possibility of a book study on Ethical Nonmonogamy (Polyamory). I did this because two of my then-parishioners had come to me saying they were hopeful of one day being able to come out as poly in church,” Kinman wrote.

He formed a planning team that decided to start by studying a 1997 book with a clickbait title that for a quarter century has been a beacon for polyamory: The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities.

“That book study IS going to happen,” he wrote, and said there will be confidentiality safeguards in place for participants. “It’s sad and infuriating that this amount of caution is needed just to read a book and learn, but that is the church we are living in.”

He then wrote that he did not know Chapman, but praised Richter and Goff as “courageous priests whose indelible ordination is no longer recognized by the Episcopal Church because they were forced to chose between being honest about who they are as polyamorous images of God (the Great Polyamorist themself!) and their jobs and orders.”

Someone in the chat during the online conversation asked how clergy who are supportive of nonmonogamy can discuss the issue with their congregations. “I think it depends on how safe you are, right?” said Richter. “Because we’ve all recently heard a story of a priest who, one of the things that he got in a lot of trouble for was just wanting to have this conversation.” Richter discusses polyamory and other topics on her Substack blog.

Polyamory is a bridge too far for many Episcopalians — even many who are quite open to topics like same-sex relationships and transgender identity. When General Convention in June passed a variety of resolutions in support of same-sex marriage, the language made reference to a covenant between “two persons,” rather than the traditional “man and a woman.”

But it’s a movement with a growing footprint in the broader society, especially among young people. References increasingly appear in popular culture, and the polyamory “subreddit” forum has 373,000 members.

“A sizable portion of adults in the United States and Canada have been or are currently involved in consensually non-monogamous relationships (e.g., swinging, open, and polyamorous relationships),” according to a 2021 article in Frontiers in Psychology. “Approximately 1 out of 22 people (4–5%) who are currently in a romantic relationship identify as part of a consensually non-monogamous relationship.”

In other words, polyamory is widespread enough that even priests who do not support the practice are increasingly likely to encounter it in their congregations.

A resolution that might have provided some protection to priests in polyamorous relationships failed to advance at General Convention.

Resolution A145 called on “disciplinary authorities to exercise pastoral compassion and discretion during the 2024-2027 triennium with those clergy and laity who disclose the diverse ways in which they are forming family and household structures that seek to be holy, faithful and lifegiving.” Some saw this as a reference to polyamory, although that term does not appear in the resolution. A member of the committee that proposed the resolution said polyamory came up in committee discussions, but that the primary focus was on cohabitation without marriage. The committee member spoke on condition of anonymity.

Back to the Seventh Commandment. Richter pointed out that acceptable patterns of behavior have evolved in many ways since Biblical times. “Once upon a time, monogamy meant two virgins getting married, and then when one of them died, the other one would never remarry,” she said. “Monogamy now includes things like divorce and remarriage, which historically was absolutely out of bounds.”

Richter also raised the question of whether nonmonogamy is a lifestyle choice or an orientation — another consideration that hearkens back to earlier debates about homosexuality.

“We’re all still figuring out, how are we using these terms, and we’re not all using them the same way, and they don’t mean the same thing for everybody,” Goff said.

Chapman, Goff, and Richter said they hope their online discussion will lead to more conversations on polyamory — even though such conversations can be risky.