Canonize this!

For the Feast of All Saints, behold this glory, a new work of the queer Episcopalian illustrator Andrew Freshour, "Jesus Christ and the Saints."

In total, I painted fifty saints. It was quite the journey picking them all. I included saints from the Anglican/Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and various Protestant reformers. I also added important Christian civil rights activists and martyrs, like MLK Jr, Jonathan Daniels, and Matthew Shepard.  

I think I've puzzled out another dozen. How many can you divine?

Mary, don't you weep

My first experiment with generative AI that transforms words into images, something called Firefly which comes with Adobe. For any prompt it conjures up four images, which you can then tweak by choosing art or photo, a range of styles and moods, and of course altering the wording of the prompt. As with ChatGPT's glib words, the images can be pretty cheesy, and the four often offer a demo-graphically balanced set of images (as for "tree teachers" above).

But some of the images can be quite lovely (until you fully process that these are fake photo-graphs), like these gene-rated from a few sen-tences about torrey pine trees. But the coolest thing is that you can add to all this an image of your own for "reference" - colors and textures, I gather. Still, there be monsters. As I played around with more and less specific and more and less obscure prompts, I decided to see if it could generate something like an image I'd recently enjoyed at the Met, of Jesus, his mother Mary, her mother Anna, and her mother, too. Though I just put in Jesus, Mary and Anna this was a bridge too far; instead of Anna I kept getting Joseph. For fun, I added a photo I took of a voluptuous tree spirit I took at the "Tree & Serpent" show of early Buddhist art. 

And got these remarkable painted statues of holy families (the Indian "reference" I sent was just carved red sandstone, not painted). But wait. This Mary is bearded! What's confounding isn't that Firefly got things so wrong but that it's so convincingly wrong.

May your lips kiss mine!

Pope Francis met with leaders of Rainbow Catholics! among their gifts to him was the book on LGBTQ Chinese Catholics I had a hand in. 

Generation gap

The author of several widely read books on queer theology came to our church today to preach and lead a discussion on the subject. At least I thought his books were widely read! From the discussion it became clear that not only is "queer theology" a blank for many in our congregation but the very word "queer" remains for them a term of abuse. In vain did the speaker respond (perhaps a little glibly) that a certain amount of discomfort might be a good thing, especially in theology. What the term triggered for these people was clearly more than discomfort.

This reaction was eye-opening for me. In the circles in which I move "queer" has completely shed these associations. In the religious circles in which the speaker's books are known (and even thought to be a little basic) "queer theology" is almost mainstream now. And in schools like the one in which I teach, "queer" is one of the most common forms of self-identification among students and unequivocally a good thing. Our speaker talked us quickly through a few different senses of queer - an "umbrella term" for non-normative sexualities, a term of "transgression," a term of "resistance," a way of challenging "binaries" of all kinds, and even a formulation of "non-identity." I wonder if it has any of that productively uncomfortable baggage for either my aging co-parishioners or my young students!

In the setting of our church discussion, the term "queer" got in the way of many folks' hearing much of anything our speaker shared. Certainly inaccessible to them was the idea that "queer theology," whatever it is, isn't just theology by and for "queer people," whoever they be, but "theology" that is liberating for everyone. Who couldn't benefit from release from the binaries of identity and the dead weight of supposedly fixed identities? And isn't that the "good news"?

An amusing tangent, in discussion with friends after the discussion: the speaker had mentioned that his books have been translated into several Asian languges, including Chinese, which has a new word that even sounds a little like "queer." I recalled that "queer" doesn't translate into other European languages either, appearing as a loan word in discussions in German and French. While I worried about the implicit Anglo-American associations of the concept in these contexts, a friend loved the idea of a loanword, and wondered if we might just need a new word, too, without the negative associations... though that might blunt its edge. 

All to the good, I found myself thinking. A word by itself can't do that much, even if one could control its associations. And since we're talking "queer" - essentially a verb rather than a noun or adjective - any settled word will be a failure. If it holds open a space without upstaging itself, that'll be enough. Any suggestions?

Witness

It's the last Sunday in June, the day of New York City's Pride Parade. When in the city I've been involved in one capacity or other since 2000, when I was part of a Dignity protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral; it's fun and a little transgressive to participate in the religious part of the parade! Since 2018 I've enjoyed queer Christian witness of another kind at Church of the Ascension's "water station" at 10th Street and Fifth Avenue, offering trays of water to people marching by as well as garbage bags for them to dispose of the empty plastic cups. Between groups, I pondered the folks gathered to watch the parade, and considered how much has changed since 2000 - and how precarious some of its victories feel today. What a blessing to be reminded how many of us there are, from every station of life, and how various.

华人同志天主教徒故事

Proofreading a steady stream of translations doesn't quite made me an editor of the just published English edition of this lovely book, but since I was one of the people who got editor Eros Shaw to assemble the 2018 Chinese original, it makes a vague sort of sense. I'm happy to have contributed in any way I could to this important collection of LGBT Catholic narratives from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and "Overseas" (South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, Canada). The editor, whom became a friend during my year in Shanghai, has since been involved with the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics - who will, we hope, ensure wide circulation of these tales from inspiring communities most have surely never imagined exist. 

(Why did the title change? Eros tells me the publisher, in Malaysia, thought the former too explicit for the English edition, since few would recognize it as a quotation from the Song of Songs. Instead the publisher suggested "Love is Love." Eros insisted on a biblical title, and so found Blessed Are Those Who Mourn, with the full line at the top for those unfamiliar: "for they will be comforted.")

It happened here!

Thanks to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project for the reminder: Ellen

Barrett's ordination at Holy Apostles was forty-five years ago today!

Helena of Holy Apostles?

It's been - egad - a decade since I learned that a young researcher, H, had discovered the Church of the Holy Apostles to have been an important hub for gay rights organizing around and even before Stonewall. The researcher, now a friend, was passing through NYC this weekend and came to church with us. (She's known and loved by the congregation, having given a rousing talk for us on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.) But her research is ongoing, and keeps uncovering more inspiring stuff! 

A particularly exciting example: It was at Holy Apostles that the first open lesbian, Ellen Barrett, was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, in 1977. She'd had a long relationship with the church, knowing it in part through some of the secular organizations that had meetings in the parish house. The last time I talked with H about her, she told me she'd tried and tried to track the Rev. Dr. Barrett down, but she seemed to have fled the world for a monastic order. That turns out to be true - but not the end of the story! It emerges that Sister Helena OSB, as she is now known, has become a priest affiliate at St. Mary's Cathedral in Glasgow, and quite a few of her sermons are available online. (May I say thank you, covid?) 

H has been in touch with now 75-year-old Barrett, and plans to interview her soon. All very exciting, as she was an eyewitness, a partic-ipant, a focal point of so much of this history! I found a taste of how delight-ful and informative that conversation will surely be on the twitter feed of a short-lived inclusive Christian youth group - notes from an autobiographical talk Helena Barrett gave in 2018, with the hashtag #WhyStayLGBT - though #WhyStayChristian was clearly a theme too!

Quite a story she tells, with lots of doors closing and others opening. She did indeed join a monastic community in Britain in 2004 as an "alongsider" - where she met another nun who became her wife!

The voice that emerges from these notes, and from the recordings of her sermons, is so engaging... "Why am I a Christian?" she said, "Because I can't not be, and even the church can't stop me, though God knows theyve tried"! I hope can talk to her sometime, too...

Queer family

Hello, family! Today is the Feast Day of Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany - special friends of Jesus. Maybe even more special than we're told. (This early 16th century Valencian family portrait is a rarity.) Kittredge Cherry, whose QSpirit updates I follow, directs us to a reflection from MCC Moderator Nancy Wilson.

Jesus loved Lazarus, Mary and Martha. What drew Jesus to this very non-traditional family group of a bachelor brother living with two spinster sisters? Two barren women and a eunuch are Jesus’ adult family of choice. Are we to assume they were all celibate hetero-sexuals? What if Mary and Martha were not sisters but called each other ‘sister’ as did most lesbian couples throughout recorded history?

My friend M reminds me that sibling-language has been used in all sorts of ways (not least by Jesus), but this suggestion delights me. Whatever their relationships, the household of Lazarus, Martha and Mary is a unit, complete. Jesus felt at home there, and so can we.

Evangelical family romance

An imperfect contribution to a question many of us are asking - whether the white Evangelicals will again vote for Donald Trump - in this morning's Times argues that Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. The people from Sioux Center, Iowa whom author Elizabeth Dias quotes (chosen how she does not say) give a more nuanced, or at least more complicated, view. One is Micah Schouten:

“Trump’s an outsider, like the rest of us,” he said. “We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is.” 

“Is he a man of integrity? Absolutely not,” he went on. “Does he stand up for some of our moral Christian values? Yes.”

The most interesting exchange, I thought, came later, with Schouten and his wife Caryn at home, and concerns not Trump but his vice president.

[Caryn:] “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”

Her voice grew strong. “I would say it takes a stronger woman to submit to a man than to want to rule over him. And I would argue that point to the death,” she said.

She felt freer as she spoke. “Mike Pence is a wonderful gentleman,” she said. “This is probably a very bad analogy, but I’d say he is like the very supportive, submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the glory.”

She turned to her husband. “Let’s be real, Micah, do you have any clue what goes on in our children’s lives on a daily basis? No.” They laughed.

“Pence you can picture as your father, as your dad,” he said. 

But Mr. Biden as president really worried her: “Biden is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”

Even without Dias's overbearing omnipotent narrating, this is fascinating. For one thing, the gendering of Christian devotion which some of us call queer is on full display: the Christian church, with all its men, is the bride of Christ, and calls its members to wifely virtues. Meanwhile submission, which Christ himself modeled, isn't weakness but strength. (Indeed it's why Christian womanhood is seen as the foundation of social order; men are in fact the weaker sex, though you gotta love them for who they are.) But aren't Caryn and Micah saying different things? She sees Pence as like herself, an omnicompetent but self-effacing wife, while he sees him as like himself, a loving but fallible father! 

Was Micah not listening to what Caryn said? I think they may in fact be describing the same thing from different vantages, the strange and wondrous life of the classic Christian virtue of obedience. “God’s standard requires absolute, total, perfect, obedience," Dias quotes from a sermon at the Schoutens' church. But the virtue of obedience, which makes order (understood always as hierarchy) possible, is best exemplified in unquestioning service of an imperfect superior. Living that paradox is part of Christian adulthood, all of us defined by our obediences, whether to parent, husband, or God (or all of them), most complicatedly where you are also called to the servant leadership of others obedient to you. You can obey, even love, someone you don't respect, not because of who he is but because of who you are. (Also significant but secondary: the quality of your obedience might change them.)

Obedience is one of the Christian virtues which seems antithetical to democracy, but democracy relies on something very like it at its most challenging point: in accepting the outcomes of elections, even when the system fails. Democrats, from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton to Stacey Abrams, have embodied that virtue in accepting democratic outcomes, even when unfair. But Trump has shown his absolute, total, and perfect rejection of that virtue, and is indeed doing his darndest to reject a fair rout in advance. (That's doubtless one source of Caryn's infantilizing view of Biden.) 

Is it too much to hope that these white Evangelical supporters will see how obedience to one who is obedient to none tempts the demonic?

在爱里我们在一起

My travels are nearly over... but not quite. I'm spending the long weekend (Monday is the Dragon Boat Festival) at a queer Christian retreat at Sheshan, Shanghai's holy mount. And I hope to touch base again with Nanjing... I'd pledged to myself a return visit to its museum, and now that I've imbibed the north's ancient claims to true Chineseness it might be good to give a south older than Shanghai a chance to reply.

QC at AAR!

While I'm enjoying the Shanghai life, all my friends have converged on San Diego for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting. Just in time our book is out - doesn't it look nice in such good company?

Queer Christianities: The Book!

The cover art for our forthcoming book is lovely, wouldn't you agree?

 

Someone at NYU Press designed it, but all three of us co-editors love it.

Life after DOMA?

I was invited up to Yale for an interesting symposium of historians and queer theorists. It seems to have been planned in a moment somewhat like the one in which we concocted Queer Christianities (the reason I was invited): same-sex marriage having, with almost unthinkable speed, become a legal reality (in New York, or nationally), one wanted to make sure other concerns and commitments, including ones which did not foreground marriage, weren't left behind. Somehow ours managed to be much more upbeat, though. I'm trying to figure out way. Where ours featured talks by and about people who were queer and Christian and whose lived experience offered resources for imagining better futures (look! look!), this one offered talks by folks many of whom were queer and married and uneasy if not conflicted about it (keep moving, folks, nothing to see here!).

This connected in more poignant ways with questions of the future than ours did. It's not just that our folks wanted to be members of the church (often more than the church wanted them as members) while today's folks didn't really want to be recognized by the state. Participation in the church is compatible with a continued sense of oppositional, even prophetic identity (call it "queer" if you wish!) in ways in which involvement with the state can't be - certainly not the neoliberal state which, one presenter argued, promotes marriage as a way of reducing its commitment to care for its citizens in other ways. Only one panelist (a theological ethicist) even mentioned that queer folks might affect the institution of marriage in positive ways. Does that go without saying, or are we afraid to say it - afraid it might not be true?

The question haunting the whole discussion: can gay and lesbian couples, now able to enjoy the comforts of state-supported domesticity, be counted on to continue being on the vanguard of vigilance and care for the still marginalized? That's the question, for queer Christians, too.

Moving pictures

Up to Ossining for a celebratory dinner with the Queer Christianities crew. The bleak weather - a far cry from the autumnal splendor of our last outing - only made the warm cheer that much more festive by contrast. And we went to see a perfectly silly movie, Wes Anderson's delirous "The Grand Budapest Hotel" before dinner - and watched a creepy old masterpiece over some New Mexico bubbly I'd brought afterward, 1945's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

Roundtable night

If I do say so myself we put on a very good show in Lang's Religious Studies world despite limitations of budget, personnel and institutional recognition. Tonight's roundtable was no exception! Four incisive presentations on questions of religion and politics from different parts of the world helped frame a wonderfully wide-ranging discussion. The first speaker introduced some of the American Evangelical organizations which have been supporting - if not indeed instigating - the push for anti-gay legislation in Uganda and other African countries. The second (a graduating senior) described the intriguing ways in which Islamist parties' victory in recent parliamentary elections may actually blunt their capacity to criticize the monarchy in Morocco. Next, we learned about how the so-called revival of Daoism in China is often driven by local politics and business people, while the communist government has created a new curriculum for Daoist priests that focuses on texts rather than ritual practices. Finally, a discussion of the role of gay-oriented religious organizations behind, beside and within the 1970s gay liberation movement offered a new and empowering view of the relationship of sexual minorities and the church. (The presenter is one of the contributors to our Queer Christianities book.)

Great stuff, and, as in every truly interdisciplinary or comparative discussion, all sorts of synergies. For instance, what might a less secularist understanding of gay issues in the US portend for other places - and what uses might such a narrative serve? Are there better and worse ways in which religious groups might participate in or even be institutionalized within the state? The whole discussion was framed by a brilliant spin on the famous story of the trial of Socrates. Recalling the way Plato's Socrates would banish poets from the ideal Republic, the moderator (my colleague M) opined that Socrates - often seen as a proto-secular martyr to religious persecution - was in fact being arraigned for the religious move of declaring some people beyond the pale. Echoing recent discussions of "political theology" he wondered if modern views aren't all guilty of naiveté and hypocrisy in supposing that "religion" and "politics" are neatly distinguishable in the first place.

Local and global, old and new, practice and theory, students and faculty, challenged pieties and new hope: The New School at its best!

New friends

Queer Christianities 2 was another success, a worthy successor to last year's book-generating (we hope!) conference. This was a bare-bones operation, but I think that's part of what made it so genial. Nobody was getting an honorarium. (Our two out of town speakers got their travel paid but not accommodation; the one from Britain is staying, with her husband, on my queen size aerobed!) And the program? Stellar - really! The magic seems to be our freedom to bring things together that other institutions wouldn't or couldn't. So we had four amazingly strong papers by students, an undergraduate and three seminarians (two of whom are alums), a performance piece (to lunch), incisive talks by a cutting edge queer theologian and a leading sociologist of the body in American religion... And then a panel discussion gaily bringing everyone together.

Live action

Today's round table discussion of lived religion was a blast! We had promised discussion of "Buddhist environ- mentalism, Jewish humor and queer Christians," and delivered on every front. B, a Canadian scholar I heard at a conference last year, spoke about her research with Wind Horse Farm, a Shambhala forest village. J, a colleague who teaches Jewish history spoke about how "A priest, a minister and a rabbi ..." jokes record a subtle refusal of Jews to be classed as a religious group. And I spoke about the icons of Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, reproductions of some of which are important parts of American queer Christianity.

The unifying theme was "lived religion," and we explored its methodology and fruits in different and complementary ways. B's work is ethnographic, J is working with materials from folklorists, and I was engaging with material culture. In another way we generated a cohesive discussion as all of us are trained as text people, philosophers and ethicists, and have come to the study of lived experience for many of the same reasons. I don't have time to summarize all our arguments, but I'll give you one of the takeaways of B's talk, one of the jokes from J's, and the itinerary of my talk.

B's work is in what has sometimes been called "empirical ethics," and as a result of five years' regular visits to Wind Horse Farm she has been able to document how the intentionally Buddhist community has worked through a number of different understandings of their life sustaining community and working the forest. Some of the Buddhist concepts which Buddhist ecology scholars say should be important are - especially interdependence and ahimsa. But you can't understand their role in the life of the WHF community without also grasping the Shambhala understanding of Buddha nature ("basic goodnesss," "nothing missing"), and the importance of meditation in the forest ("forest mind"). Attention to the lived experience of life with the forest can "complement, challenge and transform" philosophical understandings of the meaning of Buddhism, she concluded.

J used collections of jokes to suggest that the promotion of Judaism as part of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" underlying American values, promoted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews in the 1930s (they sent "tolerance trios" of Protestants, Catholics and Jews across the land, the airwaves and newsreels) and given official presidential imprimatur by Eisenhower in 1952, was not unproblematically accepted by Jews, who started telling jokes like this (I paraphrase, except for the punchline):

A priest, a minister and a rabbi are asked what they hope people will say of them after they die. "I hope people say I faithfully presented the mysteries of the Trinity," said the priest. "I hope people say I saved many souls for Christ," said the minister. And you, the rabbi was asked, what do you hope people say after you die? "Look, he's breathing!"

J suggested that in this and kindred jokes the Jewish voice, presented as down to earth and a bit crass, conveys a "deep ambivalence," an angry refusal even, of Christian understandings of religion, a rejection under the surface acceptance of the idea that Protestant, Catholic and Jew are in fact the same kind of thing. The jokes also represent a vindication of the everyday, making them doubly interesting as an object of reflection in "lived religion."

My remarks, finally, were an extended infomercial for the Queer Christianities conference, which is exactly one month away! I drew on William James and Robert Orsi to suggest that lived experience is the most creative part of religious life (systems, etc., are what James calls "second-hand religion"), and that the discovery and veneration of saints is a good example. I proposed that every age or group finds the saints it needs, including queer Christians today, and worked my way through six icons by Brother Robert, allowing them to accumulate in the screen above our heads like an ikonostasis. Icons are figures that you don't so much look at as looked at by, doing a little more than just representing a Christianity in which you can live. Behold (and be held):
 
St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes (and also, Orsi argued, of a generic American Catholicism); Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker and not a canonized saint (and someone whose most devoted followers would hate to see her coopted by the church); Mychal Judge, the gay Franciscan FDNY Chaplain who died on 9/11 (also not likely to be canonized, although a campaign is underway and miracles claimed); two icons of early Christian martyrs, Polyeuct and Nearchus, and Perpetua and Felicity, both presented as couples; and as a final provocation, since he wasn't any kind of Christin, Harvey Milk. Images of these and other icons of Brother Robert circulate widely. A lived religion study of them would look at who uses them and how, and what they think they are doing, both to understand this particular community now, but also to understand better what must have been happening for all Christian communities at all times.

Together the three presentations, with the rather exciting discussion which followed, made for a very satisfying afternoon, with lots of interesting new perspectives on various religions, and useful methodological and ethical reflection, too. In particular, do we think that "lived religion" can escape being a corrective, a reaction to older tradition-based understandings of religion? (Yes, for various reasons, hopefully... but it's a good question!) Thanks, everyone!