University of Richmond offers ‘Queer Bible’ course for students to study ‘queer pleasure in the Bible’
Class topics could include ‘questions of sexuality, gender identity, and queer hermeneutics, queer time, queer affect, and queer pleasure in the Bible.’
The class professor is the author of a book alleging that ‘prophetic masculinity is queer masculinity.’
The University of Richmond in Virginia offers a “Queer Bible” religious course.
The class “brings together queer theory, sexuality, and the Bible in order to explore what it means to ‘queer’ the Bible and biblical interpretations.”
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Class readings “include both biblical texts and queer and trans scholarship on the Bible. Topics may include questions of sexuality, gender identity, and queer hermeneutics, queer time, queer affect, and queer pleasure in the Bible.”
The class is taught by Professor Rhiannon Graybill, a Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Advisory Board Member at the university.
Graybill is also the author of “Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets,” a book that “puts the biblical prophets in conversation with contemporary sources such as poetry, film, and gender theory to demonstrate that prophetic masculinity is queer masculinity.”
Other colleges have had courses and events with similar themes.
The University of Central Florida, for example, is hosting a “Queer Christian Fellowship” that will meet until April 24 and that allows students to participate in “discussion groups around the topic ‘Queer Interpretation of Scripture.’”
Wellesley College in Massachusetts also has a “Queer Bible” course in which students examine “queer readings of the biblical canon and the canon of contemporary queer theory.”
Campus Reform has reached out to the University of Richmond and the university’s Religious Studies department for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
