CLGS receives much needed financial support from several generous foundations and the growing CLGS endowment. Equally important are individual donors to the CLGS Annual Fund, whose support is crucial for the ongoing programs and projects of CLGS. If you're receiving this e-newsletter, you also likely received a year-end appeal for the Annual Fund last December. To all those who have made a donation, thank you so much! And it's not too late to join that growing number of individual donors who ensure that CLGS will keep changing lives and transforming institutions. This is a great way to start the New Year - every dollar counts in the Center's work of advancing the well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Click here to make a secure, tax-deductible online donation!

CSR Courses in January and a Special Reception
Courses that fulfill requirements for PSR's Certificate in Sexuality and Religion are offered during the January Intersession term and are available on a course by course basis. Two courses are being offered this month. The first, on sexuality and gender, is offered by Lydia Sausa, a much sought after sexuality educator who currently teaches at San Francisco City College. The second course, on the intersections of racism and heterosexism, will be offered by Rev. Deborah Johnson of Inner Light Ministries. A special reception for Rev. Deborah will take place on Wednesday, January 16, 11:00 - 12:30 in the CLGS Office, Room 210, in the Holbrook Building on the PSR Campus. Everyone is welcome to join us for this opportunity to meet Rev. Deborah and hear more about her important work. Join us! For more information on the Certificate in Sexuality and Religion, go to http://clgs.org/6/6_1.html).

In cooperation with the National Center for Transgender Equality, CLGS will host the second Transgender Religious Leadership Summit on the PSR campus, January 20-21. The first summit, in January 2007, drew more than sixty participants and garnered the attention of a variety of news media reporters (for more information on the first summit, go to http://www.clgs.org/4/press_releases.cfm?ID=37&display=expand).This year's invitation-only summit will focus on denominational policies concerning transgender people and immediately precedes the annual Earl Lectures and Pastoral Conference at Pacific School of Religion. For more information on the summit, please contact Bernard Schlager at bschlager@clgs.org. For more information on the Earl Lectures, please go to http://psr.edu/page.cfm?l=84,

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 on the PSR Campus

In 1983 John Boswell published his path-breaking and agenda-setting work, "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality." Twenty-five years later CLGS hosted a conference on the PSR campus to mark that important work and to chart the future of this important scholarship. On that occasion CLGS was pleased to establish the John E. Boswell Lectureship Fund, which will support excellence in LGBTQ religious scholarship by bringing pioneering scholars to the PSR campus to share their latest research. CLGS is pleased to announce that the inaugural Boswell Lecture will be delivered by Dale Martin, the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. Professor Martin is the author of, among other books, "The Corinthian Body," "Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians," and most recently, "Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation." The lecture will be offered on Wednesday evening, April 30. For more information on the Boswell Lectureship Fund, go to http://www.clgs.org/8/boswell_fund.html.

On the Move: MCC People of African Descent

The sixth biennial conference of Metropolitian Community Church's People of African Descent (PAD) Conference will convene April 17-19, 2008, in St Louis, MO. Since 1998, the PAD Conference has been a landmark MCC event and it continues to be an occasion to bring together people of African descent, friends and allies. The conference theme is "On the Move - Stepping Out on Faith," and will feature three guest speakers: Rev. Bishop Carlton Pearson, Rev. Deborah Johnson, and Rev. Dr. Renee McCoy. To inquire about the conference, to register, to make hotel reservations, to be a vendor, or to learn how to support the conference, please go to www.mccchurch.org/pad2008.

Friends and supporters of a fully inclusive United Methodist Church are invited to a series of gatherings on the West coast to network and strategize around General Conference and to meet Troy Plummer, Reconciling Ministries Network Executive Director. (For more information, go to www.rmnetwork.org.)

"Revolutionary Reading" is an occasional feature in this e-newsletter that seeks to link scholarship and advocacy - a key aspect of the CLGS mission. For some LGBT people and our allies, the word "queer" is not just revolutionary but offensive, or at the very least unsettling and puzzling. Perhaps even more so when the word queer is linked to theology, as it is in the title of this new collection of nearly two dozen essays by a wide range of theologians and religion scholars. While "queer theory" has been circulating through academic circles for nearly twenty years now, it has take longer for its influence to be felt on religion and theology; this collection is thus, and for some, long overdue. "Queer" in this setting is not just a short-hand synonym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, not to mention intersex, questioning and ally. "Queer" functions rather as a way to notice, analyze and reflect on the wide range of experiences, communities, people and identities that just don't "fit" the categories and classification schemes of contemporary society. As Gerard Loughlin notes in his introduction to this collection, theology itself is a "queer thing" when it doesn't fit the patterns, rhythms and expectations of modern life. In that sense, "queer" is not yet another identity label but a posture or position toward reality that opens new horizons of meaningful practice. The essays in this collection address what those new horizons might portend for theological studies and are organized in six parts (ranging from "Queer Lives" and "Queer Church" to "Queer/ing Tradition" and even "Queer Orthodoxy"). As scholars and teachers incorporate this kind of work into the classroom, it remains to be seen how it will translate into various arenas of social activism and religious advocacy - arenas where "queer" is a deeply problematic term. Meanwhile, there is much to be gleaned from these essays, most of which are accessible to a general audience (though some clearly require at least some background in religious studies) and some are even suitable for congregational study, especially since "queer" in this collection aims beyond self-identified LGBT people and toward anyone who suspects their own "queerness" just might resonate with the strange and rather odd dynamics of religious faith and practice. (If you order this book through the Amazon portal on the CLGS website, CLGS will receive a portion of your purchase price!)