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Justice In The Church

Working Together: Feminist and Queer Theology in Conversation with Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D.

Mary Hunt, Ph.D. kicks off FutureChurch’s Pride Month series with a presentation on “Working Together: Feminist and Queer Theology in Conversation.”

Dr. Hunt’s presentation names the current lived reality for women and LGBTQ+ people in the Catholic Church, explores the histories and intersection of both feminist and queer theologies, and offers practical suggestions and principles for working together toward justice in the world and church. Dr. Hunt then engages in conversation with several participants.

Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is a feminist theologian who is cofounder and co director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. A Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to social justice concerns. Visit the WATER website to learn more about their work and about Dr. Hunt and her publications.

Reading List

Mary E. Hunt (5.4.24) mentioned a variety of foundational historical sources in feminist, liberation, and queer theologies on which current work is built. These sources are meant to be illustrative not exhaustive.

Early feminist work:

  1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible,1895
  2. Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 40, No. 2, Apr., 1960, pp. 100-112, published by: The University of Chicago Press; Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1200194

Basic texts in pioneering feminist work in religion:

  1. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, 1973
  2. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, 1983
  3. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being, 2010
  4. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 1984
  5. Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 1988
  6. Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, 1999

Key texts for various other liberation theologies:

  1. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 1971
  2. James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 1969
  3. Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, 1994

Roots of contemporary Queer Theology

  1. John McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual, 1976
  2. Kevin Gordon, Report, San Francisco Archdiocesan Commission on Social Justice’s Task Force on Gay/Lesbian Issues, 1982
  3. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, 1981
  4. Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, 1996
  5. Sally Miller Gearhart, The Lesbian and God-the-Father, 1973 (see LGBTQ-Religious Archives Network)
  6. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism, 1992
  7. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response, 1994
  8. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Omni-Gender: A Trans Religious Approach, 2007