Welcome to Mortification of Spin, fully pulpit, a casual conversation about things that count.

With Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

This week, the Spin Bunch discusses the long-forgotten art of making friends.

Why are male friendships looked down upon, and why can't women have platonic

friendships with men without people assuming there's a romantic interest?

We'll dive headfirst into this topic which shouldn't be nearly as controversial as it is.

At the end of the podcast, we'll tell you how to download a free MP3 from the Alliance.

Today on Mordification of Spin, we want to discuss something that's really going to be a foundation to something we're going to be discussing in future podcasts.

It's become very clear over recent months, in fact, the last few years,

that issues of sexual identity and sexual orientation are extremely significant, both in the wider

culture and more and more within the church. And in recent days, we've seen the rise of

the gay celibate movement within the church

that has posing all kinds of interesting and challenging questions to the conservative

evangelical church.

Many of those answers are not immediately obvious as we works in progress on this.

But it seems that as we as we talk about sexuality, as we talk about sexual identity, we talk about relationships, we have to go back a stage.

Part of the problem, it seems, in contemporary society is that relationships have been reduced to the

sexual that it's very difficult to to talk about relationships between men and men men and

women women and women without very quickly finding oneself being pulled into talking and thinking and categorizing these relationships in

sexual terms. In other words, what we seem to have lost in recent years is the concept of

friendship. Friendship is a biblical category. We know that the Lord himself uses it as an analogy when we're told

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