The Queer God: Thoughts on Confessors, Confessants and Ecclestiastical S/M
What kind of book do you choose to read on a flight? For my midnight, 10 hour flight from Paris to Johannesburg this week, I settled on Marcella Althaus-Reid, “The Queer God”.
Crazy? Stupid? Misguided arrogance? Or not? For a long time I have been aware of Althaus –Reid’s work in the canon of “Queer Theology”, of her roots in South American liberation theology and in queer theory, and of her academic credentials as lecturer at Edinburgh University in Christian Ethics and Practical Theology, so her books have been established on my wish-list for months. Still, an initial browse through a selection of pages was not encouraging. This is not an ostentatiously academic book as Boswell and Brooten are: there are no footnotes at all, and the few notes it has are discreetly tucked away at the back, out of sight. But appearances can be deceiving. There may not be footnotes or quotations in Greek and Latin, but she nevertheless freely tosses around academic terms and concepts, and with words and quotations in Spanish, that could easily have intimidated me on another day. Besides, it is not just the words that are unfamiliar, but also the very concepts.
Consider a sample of the chapter and section headings: (Read more)
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