Rev. Karmen Michael Smith · 2023
Named a Top Book of 2023 — Religion News ServiceA groundbreaking theological work that explores the intersection of Black queer identity and Christianity — arguing for the inclusion and affirmation of LGBTQ+ individuals by interpreting Jesus Christ as a queer figure, challenging traditional theological views, and calling for a more compassionate, inclusive faith.
Praise for Holy Queer
Holy Queer is beautiful, haunting, disruptive, prophetic, and healing — a luminous memoir of Black Queer Christian faith steeped in the liberation theology of James Cone, fashioned in the brave-as-hell style of bell hooks, and chock full of remembrances, images, and insights that stick in your mind and heart.
Gary Dorrien
Author of The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel
This powerful and insightful book exemplifies a deep Black prophetic Christian witness that will touch souls, change minds and transform lives of all of us whatever our color, gender, class or nation! In the name of God's salvific power manifest in Jesus Christ, Karmen Michael Smith makes available the all-embracing Love that grounds his queerness in the best of the Black Church!
Cornel West
Author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters
About the Book
Holy Queer: The Coming Out of Christ makes a radical and necessary claim — that Jesus was not the domesticated, church-approved figure most Christians have been handed. He was an outsider. A boundary-crosser. A figure who defied every category his world tried to put him in.
Drawing on the liberation theology of James Cone and the prophetic tradition of the Black church, Rev. Karmen Michael Smith builds a theological case for the full inclusion and affirmation of LGBTQ+ people — not as an exception to Christian faith, but as its most faithful expression.
"Queer — not as in who you are sleeping with, but queer as in at odds with everything around you." — bell hooks
This is a memoir, a sermon, and a manifesto. It is written for those who were told they had to choose between their faith and their full humanity — and for the church that told them so.
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