Queering Jesus: How It's Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools
Jesus was an orthodox and reverent Jew and would as such have regarded homosexuality as "an abomination" to the Lord -- Leviticus 18:22. So the stuff below is rubbish, nothing to do with Jesus
Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:
A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.
These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of "queer theology." Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized – such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon – where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16 -- this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal – and at times pornographic – imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power. “They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.”
Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures – two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy – God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: "The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored."
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.
“Thus queer theology is a call to return to a more fully realized anticipation of the Kingdom," states a 2007 overview, “Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.” The queer theology movement has been likened to a "a rehearsal for the end times," and a “new Pentecost” that allows the Holy Spirit to “blow where it chooses," according to “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theory,” a 2011 book.
Linn Marie Tonstad, professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School who for the past decade has taught the nonsectarian divinity school’s first queer theology class, has no patience for conventional, outmoded assumptions about sex and gender.
“Like, if you think that, I’m fine with you doing your thing and calling that Christianity,” Tonstad said on a podcast. “You are allowed to live your life in a way that I think is deeply misguided and incredibly sad.”
For Tonstad, queer people and queer culture are where the future lies.
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Detransitioning woman, 18, suing Kaiser Permanente for 'pushing her' into gender-changing surgery aged 12
A detransitioned woman who is suing the medical professionals responsible for her transition claims doctors spent just 75 minutes vetting her before setting out on the life-altering ordeal - back when she was just 12 years old.
Now 18, Kayla Lovdahl filed the lawsuit last week in California's San Joaquin County Superior Court, accusing multiple Bay Area professionals of fast-tracking her treatment - while flouting factors such as her poor mental health.
The suit specifically names doctors Lisa Kristine Taylor, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, Susanne Watson, and Mirna Escalante as defendants, for providing Lovdahl with puberty blockers, testosterone, and a mastectomy in the span of just a few months.
Instead of warning Lovdahl about the finality of the treatment - or advising her to explore her gender issues through psychotherapy - the providers automatically, and erroneously, declared the youth to be transgender, the suit claims.
Also named in the sensational suit - which comes amid a growing chorus of 'detransitioning' youths expressing regret over their life choices - is the hospital who removed her breasts, and the provider who presided over the six-month process.
It specifically names Kaiser doctors Susanne Watson, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, and Lisa Kristine Taylor as defendants, for providing Lovdahl with puberty blockers, testosterone, and a double mastectomy by the time she was 13
'This case is about a team of doctors who decided to perform a damaging, imitation sex change experiment on [Lovdahl], then a twelve-year-old vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health co-morbidities,' the 35-page filing reads.
'[Lovdahl] needed care, attention, and psychotherapy,' it continues of the NorCal medical officials supposed mishandling of the situation. 'Not cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.'
The lawsuit goes on to lay out how Lovdahl - who goes by the pseudonym Laya Jane - would detransitioned last year at the age of 17, ultimately regretting her and her doctors' decision.
Forced to undergo psychotherapy sessions to undo the mental damage wrought by the procedure, Lovdahl and her lawyers write their prognosis was premature - and gave the then-impressionable preteen the 'erroneous belief' she was transgender.
To come to that conclusion, the suit states, clinical psychologist Watson - who also serves as the clinical director of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals' 'Transgender Clinic' at the Oakland Medical Center - held a single, 75-minute transition evaluation.
During the sit-down, Watson is said to have not disclosed any of the lasting health risks associated with a young child taking 'off-label puberty blockers and high doses of powerful male hormone drugs' - after discerning Lovedahl was transgender.
Taylor and Tong, a endocrinologist and plastic surgeon employed under the Oakland-based hospital system's umbrella, all agreed with their colleagues' assessment, starting her on puberty blockers and testosterone at age 12.
The double mastectomy happened a few months later, and left Lovedahl without the ability to breastfeed at any point in the future.
The trio, the suit claims, 'immediately, and negligently, affirmed [Lovdahl's] self-diagnosed transgenderism without adequate psychological evaluation,' and 'failed to inform [Lovdahl] of the significant increased suicide risk' that follow such treatments.
The suit also states that after Taylor's meeting, the three 'coerced' Lovdahl and her parents to undergo the treatment regimen - in part by warning the family 'it is better to have a live son than a dead daughter,' in reference to her potential suicide.
DailyMail.com has reached out to them for comment - as well as a fourth Kaiser doctor named in suit, pediatric endocrinologist Escalante, who referred the family to the trio in the first place.
The lawsuit went on to condemn Kaiser Permanente for allowing the invasive surgery at such a young age.
'There is no other area of medicine where doctors will surgically remove a perfectly healthy body part and intentionally induce a diseased state of the pituitary gland misfunction based simply on the young adolescent patient's wishes,' it said.
After detransitioning, she says she began regular psychotherapy sessions to help her mental health, 'which is the care she should have been receiving all along', the lawsuit states.
'The vast majority of cross-gender identified children, if medically treated in early adolescence, risk regretting the decision after they are old enough to realize their losses,' Lovdahl added.
She said the ordeal left her with 'deep physical and emotional wounds and severe regrets'.
She also claims the hospital and doctors did not provide her and her parents proper 'informed consent', which would have introduced therapy sessions, something she says was never offered.
In a statement, her lawyers criticized the procedures as 'an insane form of child abuse'.
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'Soviet style intimidation': Armed IRS agents raid, close gun shop, U.S. lawmaker says
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) is demanding answers after he says a group of armed IRS agents raided and temporarily closed a Montana gun shop in Great Falls Wednesday.
"This event is another example of President Biden weaponizing federal agencies to target and harass hardworking Americans for exercising their constitutional rights," Rosendale said in a letter to leaders of the Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Twenty heavily armed federal agents pulled in behind Highwood Creek Outfitters' owner Tom Van Hoose as he arrived at his shop Wednesday morning, KRTV reported.
IRS agents confiscated background check forms from the store that contained sensitive personal information about all customers who ever purchased a gun at the shop. The forms do not include financial information, Rosendale said, calling the act an "egregious breach of privacy" that "showed no regard for federal law."
"There is no circumstance in which 4473s would be necessary in an investigation spearheaded by the IRS," Rosendale said in a letter addressed to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
Rosendale asked the ATF and IRS to "cease conducting these Soviet-style intimidation raids." He also included a list of questions about what spurred the action, setting a June 23 deadline for response.
Van Hoose told the outlet his shop has been surveilled by state and federal agencies for the past two years. He says he believes the actions are part of a pattern. "The current administration seems hell bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans," Van Hoose said, referring to the style of weapons he sells.
Van Hoose said that though the agents were cordial and professional, he felt "invaded" and lost nearly an entire day's business.
"Given the positions of the Biden Administration, this raid appears to be an attempt to intimidate firearms dealers and owners," Rosendale said in his letter to the leaders of the ATF and the IRS.
"This pattern [of intimidation and harassment] appears to be orchestrated directly from the White House," Rosendale also wrote.
"This is yet another example of the Biden Administration weaponizing federal agencies to target and harass hardworking Americans," Rosendale tweeted Wednesday.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/highwood-creek-outfitters-atf-irs-gunshop-raid ?
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How To Liquidate Poverty
Primaily stop holding the poor down. Also offer them an investing mechanism with immediate and perpetually growing returns
It seems to me, if we want to eliminate poverty, subsidizing it hasn’t worked, so why not try giving the poor a few ladders? Why is it that most poor people have no house, investments or even a bank account, yet sport tattoos that cost over fifteen grand? Because there are no investments geared to them and their needs. Without savings, the down payment to a home might as well be a trillion dollars. Of course, to protect us from “terrorists,” the government has made it more and more difficult to get a bank account. It is easier to vote than to get banked. So why not invest in tats? If there is no mechanism to get out of poverty they might as well look the part. I think that instead of holding the downtrodden down, stepping on them, it might be advisable to take our collective jack boot from their throats.
Capitalist social security, as I call it, would be an investing mechanism that would appeal to the poor. With immediate and perpetually growing returns, many poor people might forego a full body tat, for everlasting income. The industrious might even invest in capitalist social security rather than in a pound of cocaine. People are self interested, including the poor. We all take the path of least resistance, and if that path leads to poverty, that is where we will go. Provide a path that leads out of poverty however, and the children of privileged will have to compete with poor kids, with greater merit. That is obviously unacceptable, so the poor are held down with regulations, taxes and laws. Capitalist social security is a mechanism to create generational wealth… for everyone.
Education is the single best ladder there is, or it can be an anvil, depending on what is taught. When the kids are taught with the goal of their achieving prosperity, fecundity and health, there will be more prosperity, health and people will be more fecund. If instead children are confused if they are a boy or girl, taught that math is impossible, reading irrelevant and writing a waste of time, then you will get a society filled with impoverished, obese people, who aborted their kids. While this is a problem for society, mankind and humanity, it is a boon for the elite. Their half witted brats, who deserve to be in shirtsleeves, will not have to compete with sharp, enthusiastic go getters. Instead, their peers will be hopeless drug addled homeless people, who don’t know of they are a boy or girl.
Terrorist laws have ground up the few ladders that still exist to get the poor out of poverty. Regulation has effectively de-banked the poor. If you don’t have a dozen pieces of ID and bills addressed to you from public utilities, you can’t get a bank account. Even a Christmas account. How is someone supposed to save the money for a down payment on a home if they are barred by law from saving? The poor don’t have access to lawyers either. That’s why criminals know, steal a penny from the elite and you go to prison, while you can steal everything a poor person has, putting them onto the street, and the government wont lift a finger to prosecute you. The assumption must be the poor didn’t deserve the few things they did have. Poverty in America is regulated, subsidized and husbanded by the elite.
Instead of making it harder to get out of poverty, by subsidizing it, regulating away the ladders and taxing small businesses to death… perhaps a more effective strategy, to creating wealth among the poor, would be to let their heads above water, and maybe even throw them a rope. Capitalist social security and a voucher system would be all the rope most need. Especially if they are coupled with cutting small business strangling regulations, the laws that bar the poor from banks, and cutting taxes. The only reason we have any poor in the US today is because it’s public policy. The elite want more poor and so we will get more poor. On the other hand, if everyone’s abilities are applied to the economy, the availability of everything will go up, while the cost goes down, and poverty will be liquidated.
https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/npu6ym/post/numapepi/how-to-liquidate-poverty/dQtPaNK
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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