On the Lived Theology Reading List: Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement

Posted on by

Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home, edited by Sheila R. MorrisCommitted to Home

In Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement, Sheila Morris has collected nineteen essays from South Carolinians who have taken public roles in the gay rights movement. The diverse voices include a drag queen from a family of prominent Spartanburg Democrats, a former Catholic priest and his tugboat dispatcher husband from Long Island, a Hispanic American who interned for Republican strategist Lee Atwater, and a straight attorney recognized as the “Mother of Pride” who became active in 1980, when she learned her son was gay.

The essays span thirty years, from activism during the HIV-AIDS pandemic to the realization of marriage equality in South Carolina, and all of them challenge the conventional view of the LGBTQ movement in the United States. Typically associated with the “Stonewall Rebellion” in New York City and the pride marches and anti-AIDS activism on both the east and west coasts, little attention has been payed to the Southern variants of the queer liberation movement, especially considering that queer political organization was a late-comer to the region. This book intends to challenge that perspective by giving a voice to Southerners to discuss hesitant coming-out acts, the creation of grassroots organizations, and anything in between.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Sheila Morris has edited a volume of essays that recover and expand on the southern contribution to the struggle for our people to find an identity in the South, where our adaptations to the culture landscape were many, varied, and sometimes dangerous. This is a vital book for anyone who wants to understand the shape of the gender movements of the last decades.”—Jim Grimsley, author of Dream Boy and How I Shed My Skin

“I’ve got a sign up on my wall, a quote from Lillian Smith that says The winner names the age and I know that is mostly true. But I know too that we can defy ignorance and prejudice and fear with our own matter of fact stories of how all of us dangerous provocative people account for our lives. Thirty years of history retold from the inside is in this anthology. The people who stood up and risked their homes, their families and their very lives to make the world safer and more just for all of us tell us how they did it, day by day, year by year. So put up another notice, one that defies denial as this wonderful anthology does. We can claim our history one story at a time, and the stories rename the age.”—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina and Cavedweller

“Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement is special. Really special. It’s rare to find a collection of personal essays so rich and compelling, its contributors sharing the journeys that frequently took them into regions unknown but eventually lead them back home—to themselves, their loved ones, and their communities. What a wonderful book! Read it and celebrate!”—Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

On the Lived Theology Reading List: Dangerous Mystic

Posted on by

Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to God Within, by Joel F. HarringtonMeister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within

Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic who was one of the most learned theologians of his day, but was also a man of the world who had worked as an administrator for his religious order and taught for years at the University of Paris. In this book, Joel Harrington traces Eckhart’s path from conventional friar to professor to lay preacher, culminating in a spiritual philosophy that combined the teachings of pagan and Christian writers, as well as Muslim and Jewish philosophers. This “dangerous mystic’s” teachings challenge the very nature of religion, yet the man himself never directly challenged the Church.

In the modern era, Eckhart’s writings have struck a chord with thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merton, Sartre, John Paul II, and the current Dalai Lama. A variety of Christians, as well as many Zen Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, Jewish Cabbalists, and various spiritual seekers, all claim Eckhart as their own. He was not always this influential, however. Eckhart preached a personal, internal path to God at a time when the Church could not have been more hierarchical and ritualistic. After his death and papal censure, many religious women and clerical supporters, known as the Friends of God, were forced to keep his legacy alive underground until his modern rediscovery. Then and now, Eckhart’s revolutionary method of direct access to ultimate reality offers a profoundly subjective approach that is at once intuitive and pragmatic, philosophical yet non-rational, and, above all, universally accessible.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“In this engrossing and compelling book, Joel Harrington offers a profound, moving, and accessible portrayal of one of the greatest yet most enigmatic figures of medieval Christianity. Meister Eckhart gave expression to humanity’s yearning for union with God, and for a pure and selfless knowledge of the divine. With a masterful touch, Harrington places the Dominican mystic in the changing, febrile world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and guides the reader through the development and expanse of Eckhart’s sublime thought and interior spirituality. We encounter the men and women to whom Eckhart preached, his teachers, his friends and enemies, and popes and inquisitors, all of whom are cast in bold profile in the author’s stylish and vivid prose. Eckhart’s life was filled with visions, charity, politics, and controversy, and ended with papal censure. His legacy continues to be debated. This life of one of Western Christianity’s great mystics is an astonishing achievement.”—Bruce Gordon, author of CALVIN, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School

“A rare combination of sweeping historical narrative, penetrating biography, and profound spiritual elucidation. Joel F. Harrington elegantly shows why Meister Eckhart is reclaimed as a touchstone of humane holiness in every era – especially ours. This is a book to read, to save, and to give.”
― James Carroll, author of THE CLOISTER

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.