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14 pages, 224 KB

Open AccessArticle

Clinical Implications for Helping Professionals Learned from the Pastoral Care of LGBTQ+ Youth

by John Willis Ward, Heather Deal and Gaynor Yancey

Religions 2025, 16(12), 1556; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16121556 - 10 Dec 2025

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This qualitative article is informed by queer theory, and more specifically queer theology, and explores how youth ministers in various denominations care for LGBTQ+ teenagers in their congregations. Seven youth pastors from three major denominational groups were interviewed from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), Alliance of Baptists, and Presbyterian Church, USA (PC-USA). Participants had to identify as LGBTQ+ affirming, though their congregations could be in various states of affirmation. Thematic analysis found the following significant categories: confidentiality, implications of whole church engagement, student-led engagement, theology/image of God, and degree of support for identity development. Full article

14 pages, 263 KB

Open AccessArticle

“A Little God of His South Sea”: Queer Exoticism in the Decadent Pacific

by Lindsay Wilhelm

Humanities 2025, 14(8), 171; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14080171 - 15 Aug 2025

Viewed by 1116

Abstract

This essay explores the convergence of Decadence, queer sociality, and Pacific imagery in the work of American travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. For these writers, the “South Seas” seemed to epitomize a prelapsarian sexual innocence, exempted (at least provisionally) from capitalist calculations of value and the impositions of Victorian bourgeois morality. As such, the Pacific furnished a shared imaginary in which they could articulate transgressive homosocial intimacies, both with each other and with others in their bohemian circle. But these expressions of queer, cosmopolitan kinship also depended on well-worn stereotypes about native decline, in which Indigenous peoples were seen to embody an irrecoverable past—one doomed to disappear in the onward march of modernity. Drawing on postcolonial conceptions of extinction discourse and Indigenous agency, this essay will thus contend with one potential “misuse” of Decadence: that is, as the driver of an exoticism that perpetuated imperialist narratives about the inevitable extinction of Indigenous peoples. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Use and Misuse of Fin-De-Siècle Decadence and Its Imagination)

19 pages, 290 KB

Open AccessArticle

Too Gay for the Evangelicals, Too Evangelical for the Gays: A Narrative and Autoethnographic Study of a Celibate–Gay Testimony

by Luke Aylen

Religions 2024, 15(12), 1498; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121498 - 9 Dec 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2686

Abstract

The ecclesiastical discourse in Britian over homosexuality has included a significant focus on the narratives and experience of LGBTQ+ people. However, the relationship between and respective authority given to human experience and the Bible within church debates remains a matter of contention, especially among evangelicals committed to ‘biblicism’. This study considers how even those unconvinced about experience as a ‘source’ of theology might still engage with queer narratives as an invitation for personal and cultural reflexivity and how the plausibility of theological claims might be tested whilst still prioritising Scripture. I examine testimony through a three-stage study. First, I conduct a narrative analysis of audiovisual recordings of my own prior practice of testimony as a celibate gay evangelical. Second, I offer up new, autoethnographic, thick descriptions of three pivotal crisis moments. Third, I theologically reflect upon these in relation to Romans 12.1–2 and the meta-theme of identity formation. I argue that LGBTQ+ testimonies have the potential to illuminate and thus transform heteronormative cultural patterns within the church; I argue that Christian identity formation must include the central integration of God’s identification of a person in Christ; and I attempt to model how Christians might cautiously discern God’s activity within a practice of testimony. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Disclosing God in Action: Contemporary British Evangelical Practices)

9 pages, 221 KB

Open AccessArticle

A Dilemma for Theistic Non-Naturalism

by St.John Lambert

Religions 2023, 14(9), 1115; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091115 - 29 Aug 2023

Viewed by 2110

Abstract

Non-naturalism is the view that there are sui generis, non-natural moral properties. This paper poses a dilemma for theists who accept this view. Either God explains why non-moral properties make sui generis, non-natural moral properties obtain, or God does not explain this. If the former, then God is unacceptably involved in the explanation of his own moral goodness. If the latter, then God’s sovereignty, stature, and importance are undermined, and an unacceptable queerness is introduced into the world. This paper concludes that theists have good reasons to reject non-naturalism on account of the unacceptable consequences of accepting either horn. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Morality without God: Reality or Illusion?)

14 pages, 274 KB

Open AccessArticle

Doing Dialogue Differently: Queer Interfaith Perspective

by Inatoli Aye

Religions 2023, 14(5), 583; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14050583 - 28 Apr 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2921

Abstract

This paper attempts to bring queer perspectives to interfaith dialogue in India. It will first consider what is interfaith dialogue and will situate interfaith dialogue within the framework of a theology of religions and a theology of missions. It will then offer an evaluation of some works accomplished by National Council of Churches in India with regard to the question of interfaith dialogue and sexuality. Finally, it will look at whether Christians in interfaith dialogue can learn anything from a queer reading of Hindu sacred texts. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Theologies in the Contemporary Global South)

16 pages, 340 KB

Open AccessArticle

Malaysian Roman Catholic Transgender Men, Simultaneous Failures in Gender and Religion, and Customisations of Spirituality and Ethical Living

by Joseph N. Goh

Religions 2023, 14(2), 171; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14020171 - 29 Jan 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4157

Abstract

In conservative, mostly Malay-Muslim Malaysia, transgender people are frequently articulated in mainstream Muslim and Christian discourses as gendered anomalies and recalcitrant religious dissidents. Due to the fact that normative gender identities and expressions are generally indexed as valid and, thus, ‘successful’ indicators of social and religious coherence among Malaysians, transgender people who are unable and/or unwilling to abide by regimes of gendered and religious normativity are regarded with scorn as simultaneous failures in gender and religion. By framing my analysis and theorising of selected narratives from two Malaysian Roman Catholic transgender men through Judith/Jack Halberstam’s concept of the queer art of failure, I argue that some transgender men of faith actively repudiate such disdainful perceptions by embracing gendered and religious failures, an intellectual resolution which they then translate into strategic customisations of their own spirituality and ethical living. These customisations, anchored in an unshakeable belief in God’s loving support and their inherent value in God’s eyes despite ecclesiastical disapproval, are acts of subversion that respond impertinently to and defy hegemonic ideologies of gender and religion, and re-imagine alternative knowledges, values, powers, and pleasures towards meaningful forms of liveability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Theologies in the Contemporary Global South)

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