About me

I am a native of South Carolina. Until I moved to Palm Springs, California, in 2020, I lived all my life on the East Coast of the United States. I graduated from Randolph-Macon College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and in recent years earned a doctorate at Virginia Theological Seminary. I was ordained at age 26 a priest of The Episcopal Church and served parishes in North Carolina; Connecticut; Virginia; and Washington, DC.

I founded Jonathan's Circle in 2014, a chartered non-profit organization with a mission of providing safe spaces where adult men can come together to integrate sexuality and spiritual life, whatever shape those things might assume in their experience.

My parents were Roosevelt Democrats, having come of age in the Great Depression. Probably as an act of teenage self-differentiation, but with more than a little help from the culture of the South in which I was reared, I identified as a young Republican, strongly supporting Nixon's bid for the Presidency while I was in high school, and later in college, the candidacy of Barry Goldwater. By the time I finished college, attained voting age, and was ready to cast my ballot in 1968, I opposed the Viet Nam War and had been deeply impacted by a year of field education in a Black Baptist Church, an experience which forever changed me. I voted For Hubert Humphrey.

I'd begun to feel the disparity between my Christian faith and conservative politics about the time of the famous March on Washington led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That disparity morphed into a tension that slowly became intolerable. I could not square the politics of privilege with the mandates of the gospel as I understood that gospel.

Although I count myself a progressive liberal, I've spent most of my career in the Church among people of all political stripes, from radically conservative to very liberal to libertarian to politically uninvolved. My whole career I have devoted to developing community among diverse groups with vastly differing points of view.

My own experience as a gay man living half of my life according to heteronormative standards has taught me much about being in a minority that is often misunderstood and even vilified. That, and my commitment to social justice particularly for the poor, underserved, and vulnerable lands me very close to where my parents were in 1931. The first in each of their families to graduate from high school, they faced a bleak future until there came on the scene, just a year before they married, a man who offered them and millions of others a New Deal that meant the difference between poverty and a chance of a better life.

I hope that my reflections here will inspire you to think. Faith is never about certainty but about trust. I'm looking for engagement rather than agreement. So join me in the give-and-take that is the heart and soul of democracy. I believe in common endeavor. I believe in equality of opportunity. I believe in the possibility that we humans can become a conscious species, discerning our power and our responsibility to live with each other peaceably and to love and care for our Mother the Earth, on whom all life depends.

Frank Dunn