Fourth Annual Boswell Lecture: “The Rainbow Connection”

April 28, 2011 at 5:30pm to 8:00pm

CLGS is pleased to welcome the Rev. Dr. Patrick S. Cheng to the PSR campus on Thursday evening, April 28, 2011, to deliver the fourth annual John E. Boswell Lecture. Join us that evening at 5:30pm for a reception in the PSR Chapel; the lecture will begin at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Cheng’s lecture — “The Rainbow Connection: Bridging Asian American and Queer Theologies — will help to mark and celebrate an emerging queer religious scholarship among Asian Pacific Islander communities.

As Dr. Cheng describes it:
“Rainbows have long served as bridges between different worlds: heaven and earth; east and west; queer and non-queer.  In this lecture, I will suggest that the emergence of LGBTQ Asian Pacific Islander theological voices in recent years has created a hybrid space – or bridge – between Asian American and queer theologies.  It is in this ‘rainbow space’ that previously-silenced connections between sexualities, gender identities, and races can emerge, and thus challenge and transform the dominant theological discourse.”

The Rev. Dr. Patrick S. Cheng is the Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a B.A. from Yale College.  Patrick is a contributor to the Huffington Post on LGBT theological issues, and he is an ordained minister with the Metropolitan Community Churches.  He is the founder and coordinator of Queer Asian Spirit, a world-wide online community of LGBT people of Asian descent and their allies who are interested in issues of spirituality and religion.  Patrick is the author of Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011).  He has contributed chapters to The Queer Bible Commentary as well as the second edition of Sexuality and the Sacred.  His writings have been published in Semeia, Spiritus, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Patrick lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his husband Michael, and they have been together for almost twenty years.  For more information, see Patrick’s website.

Click here for more on emerging queer API religions scholars.

Click here for more on the John E. Boswell Lectureship at CLGS.

Event Information:
http://www.clgs.org/events/fourth-annual-boswell-lecture-rainbow-connection

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