LGBTQ and religion

Esta cuestión que planteo es contestada por el sacerdote jesuita James Martin, en su libro ´´Tender un puente; Cómo la Iglesia católica y la comunidad LGBT pueden entablar una relación de respeto, compasión y sensibilidad''. He leído este libro muy propicio, en tiempos donde el diálogo es tan necesario y cada vez más escaso.

Galatians 3:28 states "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor freeman, neither male nor female; for in union with the Messiah Yeshua, you are all one." Does this mean we are all Jews (grafted into a people-so to subvert or merge our culture into Jewish culture), or that we all become gentile (the defacto of Europe in Christianity or secularism), or we lose the distinction and become mixed versions of trans-identities such as we all become united in a new religion e.g. Islam? Does the passage have religion in mind, as we understand the concept now? What is freedom, to be as we feel we should be, when we live in a world where slavery is increasing-to debt, to addictions, to work, to loneliness, to the phone, etc. and where different groups increasingly insist their ideas have the right to control and define others? What is it to be a man or a woman, a father or mother, or to lose or forsake the distinction? Research informs that sexual incidence is decreasing, toward self-stimulation. Brubaker (2016) proposes that trans-sexual discourses could apply to other trans identity discourses. Bekerman (2017) contests the mental substance of 'identity' as a noun, especially when abstract, and instead proposes it is more scientific and humane to focus on actions. So let's compare the identity discourses through the verbs.

Il 15 marzo 2021 la Congregazione vaticana per la Dottrina della Fede ha
pubblicato una risposta negativa alla domanda: “La Chiesa ha il potere di benedire le
unioni delle persone dello stesso sesso?”.
La dichiarazione è stata firmata dal cardinale Luis Ladaria, prefetto
della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, e dall’arcivescovo Giacomo
Morandi, segretario del medesimo organismo vaticano.
Sebbene la domanda suoni strana, e sembri un capzioso gioco di parole, la risposta
negativa espressa nella dichiarazione non sorprende nessuno che conosca un po’ il
funzionamento della Curia romana, in quanto segue la linea dei precedenti
documenti sull’argomento.

With church attendance in the UK taking dramatic reductions over the last twenty years (Sherwood, 2018), the contemporary context for religiosity and spirituality would seem to be in a dire state. However, exploring beyond the surface level of church attendance, we come to discover a significant diversification of both religious practice and spiritual belief that is navigating a rapidly changing world and a world in which moral values have shifted in the opposite direction to Church dogma. Spiritualism, and its many facets, is a key player in this “spiritual shift” towards less organised forms of religion, the consequences of which will dramatically impact the British religious landscape of the 21st century. This “spiritual shift” is characterised by a wide set of alternative beliefs that hold long histories of persecution at the hands of the Church. Furthermore, demographers are challenged to try and quantify the deep complexities of people’s beliefs that are not accurately grasped through each decade’s general census. Despite how a person may identify themselves in the census, this tragically misses out the complexity of religious belief and attitudes regarding more specific questions and therefore tells demographers very little about the true religious landscape. Accepting these shortcomings of modern demographic data on religiosity, demonstrates that the data we have likely represents only a narrow understanding of the reality of religious and spiritual life. This understanding has not been helped by the diversification and individualisation of religious beliefs (Wilke, 2015, p263-276) as well as the fast-changing nature of digital religion (Campbell, 2012, p1-6). In this essay, the historical background and present-day role of spiritualism in British society will be investigated with the central aim of taking an in-depth look at the social context of spiritualism’s presence in Britain, the commercialisation of spiritualism and how both technology and changes in social values are being navigated by spiritualists. This analysis will particularly focus on the role of women in spiritualism and the rise in acceptance of LGBTQ groups in society as important factors effecting not only the rise of spiritualism, but the British religious landscape as a whole. Firstly, it is important to consider where spiritualism originated in order to understand its contemporary presence.

Mark Sameth offers modern readers of the Bible a tantalizing vision of the past. The ancient authors of the Bible, he argues, lived in a cultural milieu in which gender fluidity was a mark of civilization. According to Sameth, the Bible intentionally reflects this environment by depicting gender-variant human characters and a god who is dual-gendered. As queer Jews who, like Sameth, have trans* people we love and care for in our lives, the two of us appreciate Sameth's impulse to try to locate spaces within Jewish tradition inclusive of a variety of non-binary genders. But as biblical scholars, we know that the vision he offers rests on faulty methodology and an inaccurate reconstruction of ancient Near Eastern history. Concerning methodology, Sameth conflates two very different things. These are, in the words of theologian Krister Stendahl: what the Bible ​ meant ​ and what the Bible ​ means ​. Over the last few centuries, biblical scholars have developed methodological tools for better understanding the authors of the Bible and their world. On the other hand, the rabbinic tradition has developed and refined its own methodological toolkit over the past two millennia as Jews have continuously renegotiated their relationships to the text in

joy ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University, is the author of a memoir, Through the Door of Life: a Jewish Journey Between Genders, and seven books of poetry, including Coming to Life, Psalms and the forthcoming Impersonation. B ’reishit — in the beginning of the Torah, and the beginning of the world — there was God, a very queer God. Unlike other deities described in Iron Age texts, this God didn’t have a form or face or identifiable role in the natural world. In other Iron Age creation stories, deities are action heroes, creating order out of chaos by slaying monsters, other deities, and occasionally their parents. In Genesis, God brings order out of chaos simply by speaking. No blood, no pantheon, no rivals, no triumphs to portray on temple walls, nothing to visualize or imagine. God says, “Be, light.” And light is. It may seem anachronistic or heretical to call the God we encounter in the Torah “queer.” But when I call God queer, I’m in part drawing on an older understanding of the word, which has been used for centuries to refer to identities that don’t fit established norms and categories. The Torah’s God is disembodied, incomparable, and incomprehensible in human terms. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed theologies based on the God we encounter in the Torah, but by Iron Age standards, this God is utterly queer. Later Jewish traditions and texts normalize this queer God, imagining God as a king or emperor surrounded by an angelic court. But the God we encounter in the five books of Moses has no normalizing context, no divine hierarchy to define God’s kingship, no divine family for God to patriarchically dominate, no consort, and no body. As a result, despite the masculine pronouns and verb forms assigned by the text, God has no gender, masculine or otherwise, because God has no way to demonstrate or perform a gender. Gender is a system; even the simplest form of that system, the gender binary, requires at least two of a kind, and God, as Jews affirm in the Shema prayer, is One. And, as many of us know, being singular, living outside recognized human categories and relationships, makes one very queer indeed.