Queer Soul and Queer Theology (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies)

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.

Laurel C. Schneider is Professor of Religious Studies Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of Re-Imagining the Divine (1999), Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (2007), and co-editor of Polydoxy: Theologies of Multiplicity and Relation (2010) and Awake to the Moment: An Introduction to Theology (2016).

Thelathia Nikki Young is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion at Bucknell University, USA. She is the author Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (2016) and co-author of In Tongues of Mortals and Angels (2018).