CLGS

The second annual Boswell Lecture will be offered by Dr. Virginia Burrus, Professor of Early Christianity at the Drew University Theological School. Dr. Burrus' lecture -- "What's Queer About Christian Couples? Engaging Augustine's Theology of Marriage" -- will begin with a festive reception in PSR's Bade Museum at 5:30 pm followed by the lecture at 6:30.

CLGS is pleased to be working with the Certificate in Women and Religion program at the Graduate Theological Union for this event, which will co-sponsor the lecture. The John E. Boswell Lecture, an endowed lectureship established at CLGS in 2006, brings leading scholars in religion and gender/sexuality to the PSR campus each spring. This event is free and open to the public.Read more about the Boswell Lectureship at CLGS. >>

What's Queer about Christian Couples? Engaging Augustine's Theology of Marriage

The earliest Christians showed little interest in developing a theology of marriage; it was, rather, an anti-marital asceticism that captured their erotic imaginations. It took more than four centuries for the understanding of marriage as a sacrament to appear, famously articulated by the North African theologian Augustine. Augustine’s doctrine is typically criticized for its sexism, its heterosexism, and its condemnation of sexual desire. So why should any of us return to it today?

In this second annual Boswell Lecture, Professor Virginia Burrus will consider how queer it is that Christianity should ever have developed a sacramental view of marriage at all, but also the extent to which Augustine’s doctrine can itself be queered. In particular, she will explore Augustine’s ambivalence about marriage as it surfaces in his Confessions. There, accounts of two unnamed loves (one male, the other female) are each haunted by the figures of scripture's first couple--figures associated quite explicitly with the marital ideal that Augustine attempts to present in his contemporaneous treatise On Marriage. If these loves--one described as “friendship,” the other as a “pact of libidinous love”--both fail to be marriages, marriage itself is presented in surprisingly negative terms. Ultimately, Augustine attempts to turn desires that won't quite align as they should (friendship with willed sex, and sex with willed procreation) toward textual pleasures, while at the same time his reading draws him to scriptural figures even more primal than the first couple--scriptural figures that seem to orient desire toward a radically promiscuous all-love. Where does this leave marriage? Where does it leave sexuality? The very failures in Augustine's sacramental theology of marriage demonstrate the limits of both of these concepts, while also showing us why they don’t just go away.