Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts

Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur'an

Roberta Sterman Sabbath, Roberta Sterman Sabbath

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110651003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Abrahamic scriptures serve as cultural pharmakon, prescribing what can act as both poison and remedy. This collection shows that their sometimes veiled but eternally powerful polemics can both destroy and build, exclude and include, and serve as the ultimate justification for cruelty or compassion.

Here, scholars not only excavate these works for their formative and continuing cultural impact on communities, identities, and belief systems, they select some of the most troubling topics that global communities continue to navigate. Their analysis of both texts and their reception help explain how these texts promote norms and build collective identities.

Rejecting the notion of the sacred realm as separate from the mundane realm and beyond critical challenge, this collection argues—both implicitly and sometimes transparently—for the presence of the sacred within everyday life and open to challenge. The very rituals, prayers, and traditions that are deemed sacred interweave into our cultural systems in infinite ways. Together, these authors explore the dynamic nature of everyday life and the often-brutal power of these texts over everyday meaning.

Part I: Gender & Sexuality

Introduction to Gender & Sexuality

Monique Moultrie

Growing up in my rural Baptist church I was taught a conservative biblical worldview that promised fire and brimstone as punishment for same sex attraction and condemnation for women who stepped outside of their “place.” The words “lesbian” and “gay” were spoken in shushed tones and the only “out” members of our local LGBT community were the gay florists in town. We seldom heard sermons or received education that discussed sexuality or gender in any form, but when we did, heterosexuality and masculinity was idealized. I was also taught that God loved everyone, and as the hymn we often sang taught us, we were to “treat everybody right.” Contending with this irony in practice and praise was one reason I became a religion scholar. Exploring religion as a scholar gave me an opportunity to investigate the impact of identity on religious agency, mores, and authority.

I learned in college that it was perfectly acceptable to bring questions to the sacred texts and in fact as a womanist and feminist scholar of religion, I would necessarily need to bring a different lens to scripture to bring forth new possibilities for exploring how religion, race, gender, and sexuality all interact. As an intersectional scholar, my scholarship and pedagogy focuses on the ethical necessity of being conscious and appreciative of difference which often requires an awareness of power and privilege, particularly the power to name. Gender and sexuality scholars know all too well that naming is a radical act of self-determination because they exist in fields that they had to literally create. They spoke their topics into existent as feminist, womanist, mujerista, and now queer approaches to gender and sexuality transformed various subfields. Representing more than just social locations, these terms and their intersectional analyses offer truths beyond the scriptural fantasies promulgated in religious and even academic communities. Thus, when reviewing the import of gender and sexuality for Jews, Christians, and Muslim scholars and practitioners the power to name and the authority therein demonstrates the pliability of sacred texts and the opportunities presented by queering scripture.

Utilizing gender and sexuality as key modes of interpretation brings attention to the ways that sacred texts have been used to elevate or isolate community members by providing religious moralizing for these socio-cultural determinations. While lots of ink has been used to describe who has the power to interpret and determine authorized translations; instead, this essay addresses some of the shared themes from this section as it advances queered ways of interpreting texts in service of gender and sexuality. Ultimately, these essays point towards the insight gained from alternative vantage points, namely, the importance of agency; the significance of destabilizing norms; and the value of finding new authority in overlooked leadership.

The impact of these vantage points highlights intersectionality, or the lens used to see the various ways that race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, status, and other identities overlap to produce privileges and oppression. Intersectionality reiterates that these identities are constructs created to keep certain groups in power and others in marginalized place. Yet, in spite of these malleable constructs, the impact on embodiment is quite real, and it matters when gender and sexuality is excluded from methodologies analyzing moralizing power. This reflects not just an absence of scriptural imagination but the exclusion of gender and sexuality from our authoritative insights diminishes our capacities to broker new ways of recognizing our shared humanity. The devaluing of certain bodies is at the root of many forms of injustice in our contemporary societies; thus, this section’s attention to the body and to gender and sexuality point towards innovative possibilities for pursuing justice in the world.

For instance, in Kecia Ali’s discussion of how Mary destabilizes sex and gender in the Qurʾan, she highlights the personal agency displayed by Mary as a religious actor. Mary unsettles binaries by taking the privilege of naming (both in being named in matrilineal lineage and in having a surah named for her) which is typically associated with men and embodying it as a female. As a result of Ali’s queered rendering of Mary, the religious actor is situated between difference and sameness in ways that highlight possibilities for those reading her embodiment.

Gender and sexuality scholars subvert the staid regulatory retelling of scripture and the norms it creates. They establish what feminist ethicist Thelathia Young describes as “queer moral practices of confronting and destabilizing norms,” which serve to equalize access to authority, power, and validation.¹ In essence, these are practices of inclusion that widen opportunities for others to see themselves as worthy of divine love and human dignity. They allow persons from various castigated communities to acknowledge their talents and leadership and to serve as models for others. Nicholaus Pumphrey’s queer recounting of Joseph’s narrative in Christian and Islamic is one such example. For Pumphrey, Joseph’s gender performativity or gender variance can be read as queer as he highlights the flaw in rendering sacred scripture as proof of fixed gender categories. Our past, present, and future are much more complicated and beautiful than is accepted and if Joseph’s character is illustrative of anything for contemporary audiences it is in the value of being authentic to oneself where this authenticity serves as a foundation for making a just world for others.

Queering sacred texts in these ways illuminates the value of finding new authority in (perhaps) overlooked places. A result of trusting in intersectional analyses is the recognition that perhaps these disregarded categories can be the innovation needed to sustain our disciplines and to strengthen them with the advantages that come from diversity. This does not mean a jettisoning of our past logic systems but as Benjamin Dunning’s essay emphasizes this could mean an evaluation of how these past structures are inhibiting our full thriving. Dunning’s discussion of Paul’s anthropological system (as countered by Richard Hays) highlights the hierarchies that Romans sets up and how these structures of desire are embodied in a manner that is problematic for our contemporary context. If gender and sexuality scholarship is to offer any gift to its readers and benefactors it is the awareness that difference is all around us and serves as a capable instructor for helping us to live more humanely and divinely. Readers of these essays must take seriously the lessons from the interstices they present. The challenges facing all of us are conquerable as we expand our vision, trust our choices, and embrace new sites of authority.

Notes

1

Thelathia Nikki Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Previous Publications
• Introduction
• Part I: Gender & Sexuality
• Part II: Body & Appearance
• Part III: Women & Feminism
• Part IV: Death & Mourning
• Part V: Life & Humor
• Part VI: Crime & Punishment
• Contributors
• Index of Scriptures
• General Index