The special issue of CrossCurrents Journal is dedicated to Religion and Sex/ualities and was published by Wiley-Blackwell in December 2019.
Sam Davis ’14 and Associate Professor of Religious Studies Pamela D. Winfield co-edited a special issue of CrossCurrents Journal dedicated to Religion and Sex/ualities, published by Wiley-Blackwell in December 2019.
The issue features several articles developed from papers given a graduate symposium on “Sex and Religion” that Davis organized in Spring 2019 at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Topics range from male homosexual love in the Aeneid and the Iliad, to Biblical characters such as Leah and Hagar, to gender-bending saints and the contemporary Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Davis’ own contribution looks at the Book of Job through a queer theoretical lens, and another Elon alum, Delaney James ’18, analyzes Rumi’s homoerotic poetry dedicated to his spiritual master Shams Tabrizi.
These new young voices in the field are complemented by a special interview with Robert Orsi, a leading scholar of American Catholicism who came to Elon in April to deliver the inaugural Smith-Chase Lecture sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies. In the interview, Orsi discusses his forthcoming book on the Catholic sexual abuse scandal and critiques the “willful naïveté” of those who believe the Church can handle it internally. Most disturbingly, he argues that “It is not a ‘crisis.’ It is the modern Catholic normal.”