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| Class Prep |
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Were the Men of Sodom Gay?
 - Was Sodom destroyed because the men were gay (Genesis 19)? Holly Joan Toensing offers a feminist analysis, arguing that the only way you could say "yes" is if you utterly ignore the women in the story, which of course has been a trend in biblical interpretation for most of western history.
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- How has the presumption that the city was destroyed because the men were gay affected later social attitudes and laws about "Sodomites" or "homosexuals"? Queer Catholic medieval theologian Mark Jordan will explain how sodomy was "invented" by Christian theologians in the middle ages. What have been the cultural impacts of these choices?
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- Assigned Readings
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- Primary:
- Secondary:
- Holly Joan Toensing, "Women of Sodom and Gomorrah: Collateral Damage in the War against Homosexuality?" Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21:2 (2005) 61-74 (Camino)
- Mark Jordan, excerpts from The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 1-9, 29-44 (Camino)
- online class prep
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- Seminar Leadership Summary and Questions
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- Slides for Lecture
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- Today's Authors
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At the time the article we are reading was written, Holly Joan Toensing was an Assistant Professor in the
Theology Department of our sister Jesuit school in Cincinnati, Xavier University. She has also taught at University of the South, College of Wooster, and Colgate. She has published on feminism and the Bible, LGBT issues, and disability studies, and is now a licensed professional counselor in Ohio (with her therapy dog "Chumbee" and active in the American Association of Pastoral Counseling Midwest Region). |
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Mark D. Jordan is the Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He has written extensively in the field of sexual ethics, focusing on the Christian tradition and the medieval period. His most recent books are Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (Fordham University Press, 2016). |
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- Further Reading
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- Ahern, Eoghan. "The Sin of Sodom in Late Antiquity." Journal of the History of Sexuality 27:2 (2018) 209-233.
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- Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
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- Carden, Michael. Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth. London: Equinox, 2004.
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- Dershowitz, Idan. "Revealing Nakedness and Concealing Homosexual Intercourse: Legal and Lexical Evolution Evolution in Leviticus 18." Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 6:4 (2017) 510-526.
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- Heard, Christopher. "What Does the Mob Want Lot to Do in Genesis 19:9?" Hebrew Studies 51 (2010) 95-105.
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- Jordan, Mark D. The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
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- Korpman, Matthew J. "Can Anything Good Come from Sodom?: A Feminist and Narrative Critique of Lot's Daughters in Gen. 19.30-39." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43:3 (2019) 334-42.
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- Loader, J. A. A Tale of Two Cities: Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, Early Jewish and Early Christian Traditions. Kampen: Kok, 1990.
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- Noort, Edward and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds. Sodom's Sin: Genesis 18–19 and Its Interpretations. Boston: Brill, 2004.
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- Waters, Sonia. "Reading Sodom through Sexual Violence against Women." Interpretation 71:3 (2017) 274-83.
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- Acknowledgements
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