The Courage to Be Queer

God is Queer. In a world of normative paradigms, God will never fit in and nor should we. That twitching and itching for something more will consistently be present until we step out of our closets and into the Queer. The Courage to Be Queer is about the wildness and beauty of an indescribable and uncontainable God. What is the Queer calling us to be? We are to be the ones shouting for justice. We are to be the ones dancing for freedom. We are to be the ones dreaming for hope. We are to be the ones . . . In the midst of the spectacle of it all, there will be those observers who hear the knocking and lean in. Will you open the door?""Jeff Hood is a dear prophet of Holy Truth, and this book has solidified that for me.""--Sister Liz Colver, Rostered Deaconess (Lutheran - ELCA)""This is a bold intervention into status-quo versions of Christianity. Hood enacts a radical queer politics of hope that affirms the power of relational difference and challenges readers to create new forms of inclusive communities grounded in transformational love.""--AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women''s Studies, Texas Woman''s University""What a rich story there is in this book! Surely the queering of Jeff Hood can introduce us to a queer theology that can queer us all.""--Jane Spahr, Presbyterian Pastor, Activist and Theologian (PCUSA)""Hood masterfully challenges us to examine the sea of sameness we immerse ourselves in and leave our closets of conformity. We will need to read this book again and again in our journey to embrace the abundance of God''s queerness within.""--Michelle Stafford, Transgender Education Network of Texas""This book has the power to speak life to dry bones. It is a salvific word. Hood courageously sounds a clarion call for all persons to declare their difference as holy. For to be holy, is to be queer.""--Kyndra D. Frazier, Alliance of Baptists""Prepare to have the dust shaken off of your religion. The Courage to Be Queer opens the tent of God''s love to everybody by defying stereotypes and challenging biblical interpreters to be vital and alive. This book is an act of courage that calls upon people of faith to embrace their own personal difference and then act in freedom for the wellbeing of others. Jeff Hood says everyone is truly queer: unique, individual, and precious beyond all accounting to the Queer God who makes all people new in the Spirit. As Hood engages the world, Jesus Christ, and the most familiar stories from the Bible, he shows us how to discover anew the face of God in new forms of humanity and divinity. He is in the vanguard of a new spirituality for a new age. This is a must-read book!""--Stephen V. Sprinkle, Professor of Practical Theology, Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University""Reading Jeff Hood''s work deepened my commitment to liberation theology and has firmly shifted my ambivalence about the word queer to a place of tremendous pride in being queer. The real power in these words flows from the fact that Hood lives out the queer life that he writes about.""--Jim Mitulski, Queer Liberation Activist and pastor in the Metropolitan Community Church, United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ denominations""In imagining that great creative power we typically call God as ''the Queer,'' Jeff Hood offers us a radical vision where binaries of identity and reality no longer confine us. Hood''s construction of this new liberation theology stands boldly in the tradition of other theologies that have expanded our understandings of who we are as individuals, as a community and as spiritual beings, and grants us a freedom to then construct our lives and relationships in profoundly new ways. The Courage to Be Queer is a gift to all of us in our struggle to be fully human and fully free--fully queer!""--Kristin Stoneking, Executive Director, Fellowship of Reconciliation""I live in a dark place. Jeff Hood shared the Queer God with me. I can say without hesitation that the queer rev