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Harvard’s divinity school will offer a class entitled “Queering the World: Dismantling Heteronormativity in Congregations, Communities, and Organizations” during its spring 2025 semester.

According to its course description, the class aims to introduce students to three “systematic and process-oriented approaches” to understanding “queering,” namely  “Personality-Driven Queering,” “Top-Down Organizational Compliance Queering,” and “Communal Queering.”

“Utilizing Queer theory, ethics, Queer theology, ecclesiology, gender studies, and post-colonial methods, the course examines the cultural backgrounds, beliefs, morals, values, and heteronormative structures of American congregations, communities, and organizations,” the description reads. “It proposes methods for restructuring, reimagining, and subverting heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression. 

“Examining mainline open and affirming congregations, LGBTQIAP+ affirming communities, and organizations, the class considers differences and similarities in their approaches to queering.”

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The course explores such questions as “What occurs when a congregation, community, or organization is queered;” “Can queering theology, culture, and systems lead to more than critique, pointing toward renewal with new, liberating structures, practices, performances, and self-understandings;” and “Is it possible to Queer the organization one wishes to queer?”

Due to its seminar-style discussion model, the class is restricted to a maximum of 12 students. Students who are interested in enrolling in the class are instructed to send an application to course instructor Brandon Crowley, which must include their resume and a list of their goals for the class.

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The course, which is being offered under Harvard Divinity School, purports to help its students explore several “arts of ministry,” including “Pastoral Care and Counseling,” “Religious Education and Spiritual Development,” and “Racial Justice and Healing.”

Dr. Brandon Thomas Crowley is a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School who received his PhD from the Boston University School of Theology. According to his Harvard faculty profile, his research aims to “construct specific types of methodologies and discourses of subversion which aim to intentionally disrupt oppressive forms of ecclesial and theological normalcy within Black churches. He has dedicated his clerical and academic careers to re-thinking the nature, mission, and practices of the Christian church at large.”

Crowley also pastors Myrtle Baptist Church, located in West Newton, Massachusetts.

Campus Reform has reached out to Harvard for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.

This article was originally published at campusreform.org

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