The Queer God

There are those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms. Others enter churches with love letters hidden in their bags, because their need for God and their need for love refuse to fit into different compartments. But what goodness and righteousness can prevail if you are in love with someone whom you are ecclesiastically not supposed to love? Where is God in a salsa bar?The Queer Godintroduces a new theology from the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion. Its chapters on bisexual theology, Sadean holiness, gay worship in Brazil and queer sainthood mark the search for a different face of God--the Queer God who challenges the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness, and global capitalism. Inspired by the transgressive spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with queer interpretations of grace and holiness,The Queer Godseeks to liberate God fromthe closet of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God's part in the lives of gays, lesbians, and the poor. Only a theology that dares to be radical can show us the presence of God in our times.The Queer Godcreates a concept of holiness that overcomes sexual and colonial prejudices and shows how queer theology is ultimately the search for God's own deliverance. Using liberation theology and queer theory, it exposes the sexual roots that underlie all theology, and takes the search for God to new depths of social and sexual exclusion.

Marcella Althaus-Reid is Senior Lecturer in Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.