“For now we see through a glass, darkly.” (1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)

“A Glass Queerly” is a new(ish) blog I’ve just come across which takes it’s name directly from the familiar quotation, and is dedicated to queer biblical interpretation (or “hermeneutics”).

A Glass Queerly is a blog about queer biblical hermeneutics. “Queer” has always been a funny word, beginning with a meaning of something like slantwise, shifting to a description of anything weird or strange, and ending up today describing those with a sex, sexuality, or gender that differs from what society claims as its norm. In keeping with this etymology, queer hermeneutics aims to be a way of interpreting scripture both that explores differences from the norm and that itself differs from the norm.

To a certain extent, I try to do some of this in my own occasional posts on scripture, but A Glass Queerly is more tightly focussed, and more scholarly. (The unnamed blogger’s master’s thesis is on “A Queer Reading of Hosea’s Marriage Metaphor“).

I have a butterfly mind, flitting around the topics that catch my attention at any one moment, and attempting some coverage of a wide range of subjects: LGBT inclusion in ministry, our place in church history, gay/lesbian and queer theology, spirituality and scripture as well as groping towards an understanding of the very nature of sexuality, human and animal. Inevitably, casting my net so wide, I an unable to cover any one of them with any great depth.

A Glass Queerly chooses the opposite approach, focussing primarily on queer interpretation, with an occasional digression:

Queer hermeneutics—or interpretation, commentary, or criticism—uses insights from the larger discourses of biblical studies and queer theory to arrive at new and creative interpretations that challenge heteronormativity and any kind of gender or sexual stability. In my view, to queer a text is not to make it queer but to find it always already so. The text has never been other than queer, and interpretation can reveal its interesting instabilities.

This is a blog mainly about interpretation. I aim to comment on books I’m reading that deal with biblical interpretation and to discuss lectionary passages for particular days. Occasionally, I may not be able to resist commenting on church or (inter)national politics, so expect some of that too. Please join me in a queer journey.

Much of his approach appears to be to comment on the books he is reading, including an ambitious series that aims to provide a chapter by chapter commentary on “Take Back the Word”, a pioneering text in the field. These are the first three in the series -I look forward to the rest.

“Take Back the Word” series

1. Foreword - Mary Anne Tolbert
2. Introduction
3. Reading the Bible from Low and Outside - Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

He also has a post up on his own master’s thesis on Hosea.

Two further posts are shout outs - to a celebration of the pioneering clergyman and gay rights activist Rev Robert Wood, who wrote “Christ and the Homosexual” 52 years ago, way back in 1960 - and one to my own page of links to reading scripture with a queer eye.

In keeping with his focus on books, the site includes a valuable bibliography page listing (in chronological order), notable publications in the expanding fiReading Scripture With A Queer Eye eld of queer biblical hermeneutics, but also in related fields of theology, ministry, and liturgy.

This is a new project, but an eminently worthwhile one. I hope you will join me in supporting it.

Books:

Goss, Robert (ed): Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible

Bohache, Goss et al: The Queer Bible Commentary

Stone, Ken: Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible

Stone, Ken: Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective (Queering Theology)

Related articles

• The Catholic Magisterium & Scripture
• Queering the Bible
• How the Scriptures Grow
• Practicing Safer Texts: The Bible and Sexuality, Homosexuality
• Bishop Gene Robinson on Scripture
• The Bible and Heterosexuality