Download or read book Reforming Sodom written by Heather R. White and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.

Download or read book Gay on God s Campus written by Jonathan S. Coley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Christian colleges and universities. Drawing on interviews with student activists at a range of Christian institutions of higher learning, Coley shows that students, initially drawn to activism because of their own political, religious, or LGBT identities, are forming direct action groups that transform university policies, educational groups that open up campus dialogue, and solidarity groups that facilitate their members' personal growth. He also shows how these LGBT activists apply their skills and values after graduation in subsequent political campaigns, careers, and family lives, potentially serving as change agents in their faith communities for years to come. Coley's findings shed light on a new frontier of LGBT activism and challenge prevailing wisdom about the characteristics of activists, the purpose of activist groups, and ultimately the nature of activism itself. For more information about this project's research methodology and theoretical grounding, please visit http://jonathancoley.com/book

Download or read book Tabernacles of Clay written by Taylor G. Petrey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor G. Petrey's trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself. As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to "cure" homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.

Download or read book After the Wrath of God written by Anthony M. Petro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a cold February morning in 1987, amidst freezing rain and driving winds, a group of protesters stood outside of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Amherst, Massachusetts. The target of their protest was the minister inside, who was handing out condoms to his congregation while delivering a sermon about AIDS, dramatizing the need for the church to confront the seemingly ever-expanding crisis. The minister's words and actions were met with a standing ovation from the overflowing audience, but he could not linger to enjoy their applause. Having received threats in advance of the service, he dashed out of the sanctuary immediately upon finishing his sermon. Such was the climate for religious AIDS activism in the 1980s. In After the Wrath of God, Anthony Petro vividly narrates the religious history of AIDS in America. Delving into the culture wars over sex, morality, and the future of the American nation, he demonstrates how religious leaders and AIDS activists have shaped debates over sexual morality and public health from the 1980s to the present day. While most attention to religion and AIDS foregrounds the role of the Religious Right, Petro takes a much broader view, encompassing the range of mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Catholic groups--alongside AIDS activist organizations--that shaped public discussions of AIDS prevention and care in the U.S. Petro analyzes how the AIDS crisis prompted American Christians across denominations and political persuasions to speak publicly about sexuality--especially homosexuality--and to foster a moral discourse on sex that spoke not only to personal concerns but to anxieties about the health of the nation. He reveals how the epidemic increased efforts to advance a moral agenda regarding the health benefits of abstinence and monogamy, a legacy glimpsed as much in the traction gained by abstinence education campaigns as in the more recent cultural purchase of gay marriage. The first book to detail the history of religion and the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., After the Wrath of God is essential reading for anyone concerned with the intersection of religion and public health.

Download or read book A Complete History of the Holy Bible written by Laurence Howel and published by . This book was released on 1808 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book What was the Sin of Sodom Homosexuality Inhospitality or Something Else written by Brian Neil Peterson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtually every scholar on both sides of the same-sex discussion eventually addresses the account of Sodom found in Genesis 19. However, in recent years, scholars have tended to downplay the importance of this chapter in relation to this debate. This book challenges this trend and seeks to demonstrate how the account of Sodom plays a key role in our understanding of a God-ordained sexual ethic, especially in light of Genesis as Torah--instruction for both ancient Israel and for the Church.

Download or read book The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology written by Mark D. Jordan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this reexamination of what it means to have a tradition, Catholic and otherwise, Mark D. Jordan offers a powerful and provocative study of the sin of erotic love between men. The Invention of Sodomy reveals the theological fabrication of arguments for categorizing genital acts between members of the same sex.

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Studying Christians written by George D. Chryssides and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a range of methodologies, editors George D. Chryssides and Stephen E. Gregg shift attention from normative textual and doctrinal matters to issues of materiality and everyday life in Christianity. This handbook is structured in four parts, which include coverage of the following aspects of Christianity: sacred space and objects, cyber-Christianity, food, prayer, education, family life, fundamentalism and sexuality. In addition, issues of gender, race and ethnicity are treated throughout. The international team of contributors provide in-depth analysis that highlight the current state of academic study in the field and explores areas in which future research might develop. Clearly organised to help users quickly locate key information and analysis, the book includes an A to Z of key terms, extensive guides to further resources, a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of landmark events, making it a unique resource to upper-level students and researchers.

Download or read book Devotions and Desires written by Gillian A. Frank and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a moment when "freedom of religion" rhetoric fuels public debate, it is easy to assume that sex and religion have faced each other in pitched battle throughout modern U.S. history. Yet, by tracking the nation's changing religious and sexual landscapes over the twentieth century, this book challenges that zero-sum account of sexuality locked in a struggle with religion. It shows that religion played a central role in the history of sexuality in the United States, shaping sexual politics, communities, and identities. At the same time, sexuality has left lipstick traces on American religious history. From polyamory to pornography, from birth control to the AIDS epidemic, this book follows religious faiths and practices across a range of sacred spaces: rabbinical seminaries, African American missions, Catholic schools, pagan communes, the YWCA, and much more. What emerges is the shared story of religion and sexuality and how both became wedded to American culture and politics. The volume, framed by a provocative introduction by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White and a compelling afterword by John D'Emilio, features essays by Rebecca T. Alpert and Jacob J. Staub, Rebecca L. Davis, Lynne Gerber, Andrea R. Jain, Kathi Kern, Rachel Kranson, James P. McCartin, Samira K. Mehta, Daniel Rivers, Whitney Strub, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Judith Weisenfeld, and Neil J. Young.

Download or read book Worldwide Perspectives on Lesbians Gays and Bisexuals written by Paula Gerber Ph.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 1391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume set is a rich resource for readers in any discipline interested in understanding the global, regional, and domestic experiences of LGB people. This interdisciplinary set makes a vital contribution to understanding how LGB rights are progressing—and in some cases, regressing—around the globe. The three volumes look at the lived experiences of LGB people from varied perspectives and provide comprehensive coverage on a wide variety of topics ranging from LGB youth and LGB aging to the approaches to LGB people of different religions, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Chapters focus on topics including the ongoing criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct and how international human rights law can be used to improve the lives of LGB people. Particular attention is paid to the rights of bisexuals, a group often ignored in works focusing on sexual orientation. Volume 1 focuses on history, politics, and culture relating to LGB people; Volume 2 focuses on the laws—domestic and international—governing LGB people; and Volume 3 provides snapshots of the current state of LGB experience in countries worldwide, presented by geographical region: Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

Download or read book Heterosexual Histories written by Rebecca L. Davis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently “natural”—but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity. Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality’s fragility. By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality’s stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality’s multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies, Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.

Download or read book Companion to Sexuality Studies written by Nancy A. Naples and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inclusive and accessible resource on the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality Companion to Sexuality Studies explores the significant theories, concepts, themes, events, and debates of the interdisciplinary study of sexuality in a broad range of cultural, social, and political contexts. Bringing together essays by an international team of experts from diverse academic backgrounds, this comprehensive volume provides original insights and fresh perspectives on the history and institutional regulatory processes that socially construct sex and sexuality and examines the movements for social justice that advance sexual citizenship and reproductive rights. Detailed yet accessible chapters explore the intersection of sexuality studies and fields such as science, health, psychology, economics, environmental studies, and social movements over different periods of time and in different social and national contexts. Divided into five parts, the Companion first discusses the theoretical and methodological diversity of sexuality studies.Subsequent chapters address the fields of health, science and psychology, religion, education and the economy. They also include attention to sexuality as constructed in popular culture, as well as global activism, sexual citizenship, policy, and law. An essential overview and an important addition to scholarship in the field, this book: Draws on international, postcolonial, intersectional, and interdisciplinary insights from scholars working on sexuality studies around the world Provides a comprehensive overview of the field of sexuality studies Offers a diverse range of topics, themes, and perspectives from leading authorities Focuses on the study of sexuality from the late nineteenth century to the present Includes an overview of the history and academic institutionalization of sexuality studies The Companion to Sexuality Studies is an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, instructors, and students in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, interdisciplinary programs in cultural studies, international studies, and human rights, as well as disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, history, education, human geography, political science, and sociology.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Protestantism written by Jason E. Vickers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide-from both chronological and a topical perspective-to a broad, diverse, deeply rooted, and influential religious tradition.

Download or read book Come Now Let Us Argue It Out written by Jon Burrow-Branine and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come Now, Let Us Argue It Out provides a look into a community that challenges common narratives about what it means to be LGBTQ and Christian in the contemporary United States. Based on his participant-observation fieldwork with a faith-based organization called the Reformation Project, Jon Burrow-Branine provides an ethnography of how some LGBTQ and LGBTQ-supportive Christians negotiate identity and difference and work to create change in evangelicalism. Come Now, Let Us Argue It Out tells the story of how this activism can be understood as a community of counter-conduct. Drawing on a concept proposed by the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, Burrow-Branine documents everyday moments of agency and resistance that have the potential to form new politics, ethics, and ways of being as individuals in this community navigate the exclusionary politics of mainstream evangelical institutions, culture, and theology. More broadly, Burrow-Branine considers the community’s ongoing conversation about what it means to be LGBTQ and a Christian, grappling with the politics of inclusion and representation in LGBTQ evangelical activism itself.

Download or read book Who s the Bigot written by Linda C. McClain and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, critics of interracial, interfaith, and most recently same-sex marriage have invoked conscience and religious liberty to defend their objections, and often they have been accused of bigotry. Although denouncing and preventing bigotry is a shared political value with a long history, people disagree over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This is evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is intolerant political correctness, even bigotry itself. In Who's the Bigot?, the eminent legal scholar Linda C. McClain traces the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience across a range of debates relating to marriage and antidiscrimination law. Is "bigotry" simply the term society gives to repudiated beliefs that now are beyond the pale? She argues that the differing views people hold about bigotry reflect competing understandings of what it means to be "on the wrong side of history" and the ways present forms of discrimination resemble or differ from past forms. Furthermore, McClain shows that bigotry has both a backward- and forward-looking dimension. We not only learn the meaning of bigotry by looking to the past, but we also use examples of bigotry, on which there is now consensus, as the basis for making new judgments about what does or does not constitute bigotry and coming to new understandings of both injustice and justice. By examining charges of bigotry and defenses based on conscience and religious belief in these debates, Who's the Bigot? makes a novel and timely contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religious liberty and discrimination in American life.

Download or read book Reset the Heart written by Mai-Anh Le Tran and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement burst into dynamic action following the shooting death of young Michael Brown in the fall of 2014 in Ferguson, MO, a good number of clergy and lay leaders in greater St. Louis sprang to action and learned anew what it took to “put some feet to their prayers.” However, as improvisational efforts continued to rally and organize churches toward the enduring work of confronting the insidious violence of systemic social injustices in their own backyard, these religious leaders ran head-on into a familiar yet perplexing wall: the incapacity and unwillingness of their faith communities to respond. In many cases, the resistance was (and still is) fierce, eerily reminiscent of the stand-offs that divided religious communities and leadership in the 1960s Civil Rights era. If the Church’s teaching, learning, and practice of faith is purportedly transformative, then where was/is that faith when it was/is needed most? If good religious formation had been happening - or had it? - then why the enduring signs of indifference, paralysis, apathy, exasperation, resistance, symptoms of anesthetized moral consciousness and debilitated hope in the face of pervasive social-cultural violence? The answer may come in a searing indictment: that in an emerging cultural-religious era in which religious identity, expression, and experience are increasingly pluralistic, yet also politicized, polarizing, and racialized, Christian faith communities—even those of progressive theological persuasions—are still held under dominant cultural captivity, and fashioned by colonizing teaching strategies of “disimagination” – such that the stories (theologies) and rituals (practices) of the faith have effectively become obstacles that anesthetize moral agency and debilitate courageous action for hope and change. This book addresses the above practical concerns with three paradigmatic questions: 1. What does it mean to educate for faith in a world marked by violence? 2. How are Christian faith communities complicit in the teaching and learning of violence? 3. What renewed practices of faith and educational leadership yield potential for the unlearning and unmaking of violence? An organizing thesis drives the inquiry: Thinking and teaching for violence-resisting action as Christians requires an on-purpose setting of our hearts in a world that violates and harms with impunity. Against violent “disimagination”and its conscience-numbing instruments, Christian religious communities are being challenged to regenerate radical forms of prophetic, protested faith, the skills and instincts of which must be honed deliberately. This occurs through intentional and strategic forms of public consciousness raising for the sake of participation and action - an action that moves toward and is fueled by critical, insurrectional, resurrectional, hope.

Download or read book Public Confessions written by Rebecca L. Davis and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Public Confessions reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an "authentic" identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics. Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells.