Search Results (3)

This article reflects upon how LGBTQIA+ Christians and their allies within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its predecessor denominations ‘called the question’ on their right to and responsibility for membership, ordination, and marriage by simultaneously (1) practicing apologetic ‘ministries of presence’ and (2) grounding their ecclesio-juridical arguments in the church’s long-standing polity principles. It is commonly argued that advocates for full inclusion pushed the church to change historic norms, while ‘conservative’ voices called for the maintenance of time-honored principles. In an effort to problematize such reductionistic accounts, this article begins by sketching the historical trajectory of U.S. Presbyterian theology and polity, with special emphasis on the Adopting Act of 1729 and the tradition that proceeds from it. Building upon its survey of the debates that shaped the church’s history between the early eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the text then shows how LGBTQIA+ Presbyterians and their allies acted within the traditional discursive patterns of their faith community when they advocated for the repeal of the exclusive policies that arose in the second half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the work of advocates and allies alike, when the PC(USA) and its predecessor denominations articulated an inclusive stance toward openly LGBTQIA+ members in 1978/1979, removed barriers to their ordination in 2011, permitted same-sex marriages within Presbyterian communities in 2015, and opened the church to receiving new theological insights from queer people via the adapted version of the ‘Apology Overture’ in 2016, the church’s collective discernment drew on historic Presbyterian principles of theology and governance to respond (often imperfectly) to contemporary challenges. The church’s multi-generational self-critique thus created a space in which queer Christians could ‘re-de-normalize’ their experiences of life and faith in ways that may open doors for post-apologetic reconstructive theological engagement in the years to come. Full article

Reports from Long-term HIV Survivors: Reclaiming Meaning while Confronting Mortality presents research completed by Kyle Desrosiers in conjunction with the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Applying lifespan theory to spiritual development, it discusses the narratives of four American long-term HIV survivors from Latter-day Saints, Roman Catholic (2), and Conservative Jewish backgrounds. The fifth profile is from a Protestant pastor with an HIV ministry in a rural area. These profiles are five selected from among 10 interviews with HIV-positive people and caregivers across America now archived by the author at Baylor University. Questions directing this research were: how does HIV status affect participants’ relationship to their religious communities, identities, and spiritualties?; what narratives emerge from lifespan perspectives of HIV-positive and queer participants?; and what spiritual practices, mythos, and beliefs evolve/remain as a product of living at the margins of religion and society, alongside coping with a deadly global epidemic? This project reports narratives of change, continuity, and meaning-making to discuss how several gay/queer men from a range of ethnic and faith backgrounds have used spirituality and worldview to navigate life. Full article

Multiple philosophical-theological efforts in the last century, from W. Benjamin to J. Caputo, have been centered on a messianic opposition to normative structures, a challenge that invokes a long history in the West of breaking down the codes of ordered, civilized and religious society. That such an apocalyptic fervor is nothing new to the history of theology should not surprise us. What should surprise us, however, is how infrequently we are able to see the larger pattern behind these particular movements. Taking up the recent emergence of ‘queer theology’ as the current manifestation of such a trend, I want to isolate and clarify the theological implications of comprehending the existence of humanity as a state of constantly ‘being between’. What I argue is that developing a hermeneutics of eschatology that takes such tensions as foundational rather than merely heterodox indicates that the opposition of grace and law is to be understood not as a dualism to be overcome but as the structure of history itself. The question I am posing is this: to what degree does the queering or subversion of theological normativity, or the development of a ‘theology against itself’, allow us to subvert identitarian politics and to challenge the social and religious institutions that we are a part of? It is through the lens of ‘queer theology’ and its questioning of the existence of normativity itself that we are simultaneously returned to the basic structures that guide human life, while, at the same time, propelled forward into new configurations of resistance to just such structures. By firmly placing ourselves within this ‘queer critique’ we see the ‘already-not yet’ tension of eschatological thought not simply in religious terms, but in ones that reorient our relationship to the political and social orders of this world, calling for a permanent re-envisioning of norms as the individual—and the church—are found to be perpetually—and edifyingly—‘against themselves’. Full article