This book acknowledges and highlights the moral excellence embedded in black queer practices of family. Taking the lives, narratives, and creative explorations of black queer people seriously, Thelathia Nikki Young brings readers on a journey of new, queer ethical methods that include confrontation, resistance, and imagination. Young asserts that family and its surrounding norms are both microcosms of and foundations for human relationships. She discusses how black queer people are moral subjects whose ethical reflection, lived experience, and embodied action demonstrate valuable moral agency for those of us thinking about liberating and life-giving ways to enact “family.” Young posits that black queer people enact moral agency in ways that ought to be understood qua moral agency. Refusing to recognize the examples from this (and any other) community, Young argues, denies us all the learning and moral growth that come from connecting with diverse human experiences. This book investigates how acknowledging and critically engaging with the moral agency within marginalized subjectivities allow us to consider and bear witness to the moral potential in us all.

Christian ethics is a wide and varied field; so diverse are the methods and approaches, theological perspectives and starting points, and scopes of inquiry and purposes—dare we even call it a discipline?—that the field is rarely considered as a whole. Christian ethics includes historical, descriptive, critical, constructive, and applied projects on countless topics. Lending creative energy to this field of study are a range of partner disciplines, including, most prominently, theology, philosophy, and sociology, each containing multiple schools themselves. To envision the entire field of Christian ethics is a difficult task; to reenvision the entire field may perhaps be impossible for one person. Thus, this publication includes original research by multiple scholars, each offering a distinct perspective from their primary partner discipline. Chapters include Roman Catholic and Protestant voices from Europe, Asia, and North America. In aggregate, these writings contribute to a composite reenvisioning of Christian ethics, refracting our collective vision through the prisms of diverse academic and methodological perspectives in this vast field of inquiry, study, and practice.

Does anyone need to come out anymore? Queer theory has challenged the idea of coming out as problematic for its false binary and essentialized version of identity. If gender is a socially constructed performativity, then what does coming out mean? At the same time, we live in a society that still struggles with structures of power that define what is considered normal and sanctions those who transgress. The intersectionality of gender with race, class, ethnicity, nationality, abilities, religion, age and other positional markers challenge a simplified belief that coming out is not necessary. Therefore, in the lived experience of many persons coming out still matters. This book initiates a different theological conversation about coming out. It argues that rather than the declaration of an identity category, coming out can be understood as the erotic ethical practice of truth-telling. The formation of conscience and moral integrity embody the two pillars of this erotic practice. Coming out understood as "disruptive coherence" is the erotic ethical practice of truth-telling grounded in our deepest desires to be known authentically in community.

Queer Religiosities is the first comprehensive, comparative, and globally focused introduction to queer and transgender studies in religion. Addressing sophisticated topics in clear and accessible language, award-winning teacher and scholar Melissa M. Wilcox brings her engaging lecture style into conversation with the work of scholars around the globe to welcome students into these rapidly growing fields. Following an introduction to key concepts in religious studies, queer studies, and transgender studies and an overview of the history of transgender and queer studies in religion, thematic chapters address the topics of stories, conversations, practices, identities, communities, and politics and power. This inherently comparative organization helps readers to understand the details and complexities of religions, genders, and sexualities as they are lived out around the world. Additional resources include study questions, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, an annotated filmography, and a selected bibliography to encourage further study.

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.

Through close textual engagement, theological exposition, ethical reflection, and interdisciplinary collaboration, this book presents a constructive theology of divine speech in the Acts of the Apostles and 1 Corinthians in critical conversation with contemporary issues of sociopolitical, ecclesial, and theological importance. In particular, the authors attend to pericopes in Acts and Paul that open up fresh ways of thinking about divine discourse, preaching, and advocacy in light of contemporary matters of theological and ethical import. In addition to classical modes of textual and theological analysis, the authors attend to the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic aspects of speech as they arise in these pericopes. As such, the authors are simultaneously deconstructing these texts through postcolonial and post-structural analyses to expose these texts to an alterity at work therein, an alterity that has been muted by centuries of biblical interpretation.

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

Although there are far more opportunities for LGBTQ people to become parents than there were before the 1990s, attention to the reproductive challenges LGBTQ families face has not kept pace. Reproductive Losses considers LGBTQ people’s experiences with miscarriage, stillbirth, failed adoptions, infertility, and sterility. Drawing on Craven’s training as a feminist anthropologist and her experiences as a queer parent who has experienced loss, Reproductive Losses includes detailed stories drawn from over fifty interviews with LGBTQ people (including those who carried pregnancies, non-gestational and adoptive parents, and families from a broad range of racial/ethnic, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds) to consider how they experience loss, grief, and mourning. The book includes productive suggestions and personal narratives of resiliency, commemorative strategies, and communal support, while also acknowledging the adversity many LGBTQ people face as they attempt to form families and the heteronormativity of support resources for those who have experienced reproductive loss. This is essential reading for scholars and professionals interested in LGBTQ health and family, and for individuals in LGBTQ communities who have experienced loss and those who support them. See additional material on the companion website: www.lgbtqreproductiveloss.org/

Synthesizing conversations from across gender and sexuality education, race and settler-colonialism studies, and care work literature, Towards a Queer and Trans Ethic of Care in Education explores how queer and trans teachers of colour understand and practice care. Woven between narratives and scholarly literature, Owis theorizes a unique and radical new way of conceptualizing and practicing care in K-12 educational settings, proposing a "queer and trans ethic of care." This new ethic of care is argued for as both a theory and practice. It aims to challenge the embeddedness of white supremacy and settler-colonialism in K-12 classrooms, while offering a framework that can be applied in personal relationships, teaching and research in communities and higher education. Drawing on a study of participants in the Ontario educational system, Owis examines why care is critical in the community and in practice as an education. They then ask how a queer ethic of care can help us understand what it means to heal, thrive beyond survival, and provide care outside of the matrix of white supremacy and settler-colonialism. These considerations are crucially linked to critical points of intervention in academia, schooling environments and policy at the provincial, federal and global level, demonstrating the need for a radical, systemic overhaul to the way educational institutions practice and understand care. Challenging, educating and offering new ways of thinking about care for and with QTBIPOC communities, it will appeal to scholars and researchers of gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity in education, sociology, social work, and diversity and equity in education.

Exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, and kinship within the context of Latter-day Saint theology and history, this book contains elements that can be reinterpreted through a queer lens. Taylor Petrey reexamines and resignifies Mormon cosmology in the context of queer theory, offering a fresh perspective on divine relationships, gender fluidity, and the concept of kinship itself. Petrey's work draws together queer studies and the academic study of religion in new ways, providing a nuanced understanding of how religious narratives and doctrines can be reimagined to include more diverse interpretations of identity and community.