Queer Soul and Queer Theology

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of "redemption". Starting from the root verb "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 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" reveal a redeemed God by being introduced as hard-won principles and experiences that not only re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in the traditional (i.e. inherently colonial and racist, and so ungodly) "family values" of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large.

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.