Controversies In Queer Theology

An introduction to one of the most challenging areas of contextual theology. Queer theology is a significant new development and central to much current teaching and thinking about gender, sexuality and the body.

Trans/formations is a new addition to "SCM's Controversies in Contextual Theology" series. Like anything coming from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, it is controversial and challenging as well as highly original. The book will: make visible a range of trans lived experience [transgendered and transsexual], offer theological reflection on these experiences, create challenging theology from this experiential base, and provide a resource for churches and theology students not to date available. It includes an excellent range of contributors, including Elizabeth Stuart and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is a valuable addition to reading lists of courses on religion, gender and the body.

Issues of homosexuality are the subject of public and political controversy in many African societies today. Frequently, these controversies receive widespread attention both locally and globally, such as with the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. In the international media, these cases tend to be presented as revealing a deeply-rooted homophobia in Africa fuelled by religious and cultural traditions. But so far little energy is expended in understanding these controversies in all their complexity and the critical role religion plays in them. Complementing the companion volume, Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa, this book investigates Christian politics and discourses on homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors present case studies from various African countries, from Nigeria to South Africa and from Cameroon to Uganda, focusing on Pentecostal, Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. They critically examine popular Christian theologies that perpetuate homophobia and discrimination, but they also discuss contestations of such discourses and emerging alternative Christian perspectives that contribute to the recognition of sexual diversity, social justice and human rights in contemporary Africa.

What do Christianity and queerness have to do with each other? Can Christianity be queered? Queer Theology offers a readable introduction to a difficult debate. Summarizing the various apologetic arguments for the inclusion of queer people in Christianity, Tonstad moves beyond inclusion to argue for a queer theology that builds on the interconnection of theology with sex and money. Thoroughly grounded in queer theory as well as in Christian theology, Queer Theology grapples with the fundamental challenges of the body, sex, and death, as these are where queerness and Christianity find (and, maybe, lose) each other.

Popular narratives cite religion as the driving force behind homophobia in Africa, portraying Christianity and LGBT expression as incompatible. Without denying Christianity’s contribution to the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion of same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people on the continent, Adriaan van Klinken presents an alternative narrative, foregrounding the ways in which religion also appears as a critical site of LGBT activism. Taking up the notion of “arts of resistance,” Kenyan, Christian, Queer presents four case studies of grassroots LGBT activism through artistic and creative expressions—including the literary and cultural work of Binyavanga Wainaina, the “Same Love” music video produced by gay gospel musician George Barasa, the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the LGBT-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church. Through these case studies, Van Klinken demonstrates how Kenyan traditions, black African identities, and Christian beliefs and practices are being navigated, appropriated, and transformed in order to allow for queer Kenyan Christian imaginations. Transdisciplinary in scope and poignantly intimate in tone, Kenyan, Christian, Queer opens up critical avenues for rethinking the nature and future of the relationship between Christianity and queer activism in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

The SCM Studyguide Pastoral Theology designed to support undergraduate courses for the training of clergy and lay pastoral workers at an accessible introductory level. The book aims to develop pastoral wisdom and integrity through a critical integration of theology and the human sciences. Introducing key themes in theological anthropology and pastoral practice, it shapes a creative pastoral vision which is deeply rooted in a Christian vision of what it means to be human and what it takes to care. Working with case studies, the book will introduce broad frameworks of understanding of issues such as growth, loss, and sexuality, together with critical perspectives on important aspects of practice such as language, power and boundaries. The book provides an accessible overview of key concepts in pastoral theology, offering key entry points for further discussion and study. Each chapter includes discussion questions and/or reflective exercises at the end of each chapter together with a short bibliography. Throughout the text, key summaries of learning will be indicated by boxed Practice Points.

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of "redemption." Starting from the root infinitive "to deem," the authors argue that queer lives and struggles can illuminate and re-value the richness of embodied experience that is implied in Christian incarnational theology and ethics. Offering a set of virtues gleaned from contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and asexual (LGBTIQA) lives and communities, this book introduces a new framework of ethical reasoning. Battered and wrongly condemned by life-denying theologies of redemption and dessicating ethics of virtue, this book asserts that the resilience, creativity, and epistemology manifesting in queer lives and communities are essential to a more generous and liberative Christian theology. In this book, queer "virtues" not only reveal and re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in the traditional (i.e., inherently colonial and racist, and thus ungodly) "family values" of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large, including the redemption of God. This book will be a key resource for scholars of queer theology and ethics as well as queer theory, gender and race studies, religious studies, and theology more generally.

The work of Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid is both groundbreaking and notoriously difficult to read, as it blends theories from post-colonial studies, queer studies, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist and liberation theologies. Offering a much needed introduction to the work of the theologian, Queer and Indecent shows the development of Althaus-Reid’s core concepts - indigeneity, economic oppression, the body, indecency, heterosexuality, and sex, as well as setting her life in context with an overview of her stance on feminist teaching and activism, and her critique of Latin American liberation theology. Designed to introduce a new generation to her work, the book serves as both an indispensable guidebook and a launchpad for students to explore her extraordinary writing for themselves.