University of Chicago’s Religious Studies Department is Asking, ‘Is God Queer’ in New Course
The University of Chicago’s religious studies department is now offering a course titled “Queering God,” which seeks to answer age-old questions like, “Is God queer?” and “Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking?”
The course, RLST 26105, “introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies.” It promises to analyze how theology has been used to “reimagine gender” and “experiment with new relational forms.”
“Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all,” the course’s description reads.
Students who enroll in the course do not need any background knowledge of religious studies or queer theory and will not be expected to have familiarity with the readings or discussion topics.
The course instructor, Olivia Bustion, a blue and purple-haired University of Chicago Theology Ph.D. graduate, wrote her dissertation on a similar topic. The work was titled “Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden’s Later Poetry and the Ethics of Friendship.”
“In 2017, Bustion published a paper on autism and Christianity, writing: ‘I present an ethnography of autistc [sic] Christians in three web communities. These autistic Christians construct a distinctively Christian understanding of neurodiversity and a distinctively aspie understanding of God.'”
Campus Reform
Other religious studies courses offered include RLST 25706, “Climate Justice” which outright claims, “Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways.”
Another course offered, RLST 22667 “The Christian Right” seeks to answer: “What is the future of the Christian Right in an increasingly diverse America?”
A vast majority of the courses offered under this category emphasize how race and religion view and treat “sexuality and gender.” This concept is mentioned in several course descriptions and appears to be a consistent theme throughout the department.
