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Call for papers for new Bloomsbury book series: Rethinking Theologies: Constructing Alternatives

August 14, 2017

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Bloomsbury books call for proposals Rethinking Theology book series theology

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Clearing up some misconceptions

There’s been quite a response to the Telegraph ’s report about my paper, " Intersex and Ontology: A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision ". The Telegraph itself is carrying a blog post today written by Revd Dr Peter Mullen, a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. It’s entitled “Jesus was a man: look at the evidence, Dr Cornwall” . Peter Mullen writes, “Well, the gospels were written in Greek and they always use the male pronoun to refer to Jesus. Not once do they use the equally available feminine or neuter pronouns. So the gospel writers seem to have assumed that Jesus was a man. And if masculinity is recognised by particular characteristics, there is a pretty huge pile of circumstantial evidence. In the infancy stories, Jesus is referred to as a male child. On his ritual pilgrimage to the temple when he was twelve, he is described as a boy.” Unfortunately, it seem...

Telegraph article on Intersex and Ontology paper

The Telegraph has published a story today in response to my Intersex and Ontology paper. Unfortunately, the journalist responsible has picked up only on a small part of what I wrote. The headline is also very misleading, since I did not and do not use the term "hermaphrodite" when talking about intersex. The context of my paper was the current debate surrounding the consecration of women as bishops in the Church of England. I noted that a lot of the rhetoric surrounding gender roles in the Christian churches assumes that all humans are clearly and definitively male or female, and should therefore have gender roles which appropriately "match" their physical sex. However, I noted, the existence of intersex conditions - conditions where people have some physical characteristics usually associated with males and some usually associated with females - makes clear that physical sex is less clear-cut than that. Toward the end of my paper, I remarked that one of th...

Ambiguous Bodies, Ambiguous Readings: Reflections on James M. Murphy’s ‘Christine on the Cross'

I'm happy to say that Bound and Unbound: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Genders and Sexualities (Davy et al [eds.] 2008) will soon be available as an e-version from MyILibrary . My essay in this volume is entitled “Ambiguous Bodies, Ambiguous Readings: Reflections on James M. Murphy’s ‘Christine on the Cross’” . Meanwhile, you can buy a hard copy, or view a sample PDF including the contents page, here . Abstract Christas, representations of female figures crucified in place of Christ, have been criticized for changing and de-historicizing Christ, and re-inscribing narratives of suffering and victimhood onto female bodies. One Christa sculpture, Christine on the Cross , is used to explore the ambiguities and indeterminacies around such figures. There is ambiguity over whether this depiction of a tortured female body is one of solidarity with suffering or mere voyeurism. The fact that the sculptor is a male adds to the indeterminacy. The contestation of boundaries in the sculpture ...

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