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How do religion, gender and sexuality interact? How have they impacted, and continue to impact, human culture? The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality and Gender brings together, for the first time, the key texts in the field. Designed as a textbook for use in a classroom setting, it offers thought-provoking selections of some of the most compelling and timely readings available today. The Reader is divided into three parts (bodies; desires; performances). Each considers, from a thematic perspective, the ways in which people have made sense of their religious and sexual experiences, the ways they imagine and talk about gender, sex and the sacred, and the multiple meanings they ascribe t...
“Why did it take 30 years for American bishops to listen to the victims of Catholic clerical abuse?” Gay Catholic Priests and Clerical Sexual Misconduct: Breaking the Silence is a compelling indictment of Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and sexuality. Inspired by The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, Mark Jordan’s controversial examination of homoeroticism in American Catholic culture, this groundbreaking book examines how the current crisis of clerical abuse affects and stigmatizes gay priests living in a climate of hysteria and condemnation. The book’s contributors, an eclectic mix of scholars and clerics, question whether the church can survive centu...
This ground-breaking and eye-opening book examines the intersections of religion and same-sex desire, from St. Augustine to Hinduism to contemporary LGBT and queer culture. Queer Religion provides a systematic and detailed overview of the challenges and issues that the intersections of religion, same-sex desire, and gender variance have generated, both now and in the past. It focuses upon the development of these areas of overlap through three distinct historical periods: modern religious history, LGBT liberation movements, and the emergence of queer theory and analysis. This two-volume collection of eclectic essays investigates the experiences of queer people and religion, providing a broad...
To date, no book has systematically examined the theological writings of LGBT people of color. Nor has any book explored how such writings might actually transform contemporary theological reflections on race and sexuality. This book remedies these gaps by constructing a rainbow theology around the theme of bridging or mediation. Rainbow Theology is the first book to reflect upon the theological significance of the intersections of race and queer sexuality across multiple ethnic and cultural groups. This is particularly important in light of the current polarizing debates over issues of race, sexuality, and religion within churches and communities of faith around the world.
This study of new religious movements in Quebec focuses on nine groups—including the notoriously violent Solar Temple; the iconoclastic Temple of Priapus; and the various “Catholic” schisms, such as those led by a mystical pope; the Holy Spirit incarnate; or the reappearance of the Virgin Mary. Eleven contributing authors offer rich ethnographies and sociological insights on new spiritual groups that highlight the quintessential features of Quebec's new religions (“sectes” in the francophone media). The editors argue that Quebec provides a favorable “ecology” for alternative spirituality, and explore the influences behind this situation: the rapid decline of the Catholic Church after Vatican Il; the “Quiet Revolution,” a utopian faith in Science; the 1975 Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms; and an open immigration that welcomes diverse faiths. The themes of Quebec nationalism found in prophetic writings that fuel apocalyptic ferment are explored by the editors who find in these sectarian communities echoes of Quebec’s larger Sovereignty movement.
"Human desire is a path to spiritual wholeness," says author Donald Boisvert, in this unusual look at how saints--and one's devotion to them--can be sites for the confirmation and celebration of homoerotic desire. The author comes to the topic as a gay scholar of religion and draws upon his own experience of saints including his years in seminary beginning at age 13. Saints can inspire desire and, through eclectic readings of their lives and imagery, the author suggests meanings and strategies attached to the emergence of same-sex attraction. The book contains 12 chapters that focus on saints, including: Michael the Archangel; Sebastian and Tarcisius; John the Baptist; Joseph; Paul and Augustine; the Ugandan and North American martyrs; Francis of Assisi; Dominic Savio and other boy saints; Damien and the missionary saints; Peter Julian Eymard and the Eucharist; and gay saints.
Queerness and Christianity, often depicted as mutually exclusive, both challenge received notions of the good and the natural. Nowhere is this challenge more visible than in the identities, faiths, and communities that queer Christians have long been creating. As Christians they have staked a claim for a Christianity that is true to their self-understandings. How do queer-identified persons understand their religious lives? And in what ways do the lived experiences of queer Christians respond to traditions and reshape them in contemporary practice? Queer Christianities integrates the perspectives of queer theory, religious studies, and Christian theology into a lively conversation—both tra...
Compare worldwide religious regulations involving gay sex and masculinity! Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods: An Exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective is an eye-opening look at the traditions of particular religions and their edicts concerning gay sex. This book examines the origins of holy directives involving homosexuality—whether forbidden, tolerated, or mandatory—and establishes a link between theology, sex roles, and the sensitive issue of masculinity. This text draws a parallel between homosexuality and the idea of religion, suggesting that gay rights can be understood as a freedom of religion issue. While most readers are familiar wi...
A thoroughly comprehensive and accessible reference tool for students of Merleau-Ponty, navigating his major works, influences and key concepts.
A probing study of the veil's recent return—from one of the world's foremost authorities on Muslim women—that reaches surprising conclusions about contemporary Islam's place in the West todayIn Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil...