Earlier this month, Townhall reported how Loyola University, a Chicago-based Catholic school, will offer students a course in “transgender” medicine, including the treatment of “trans children.” The two-week course would give students an opportunity to shadow staff at gender clinics and learn about irreversible, experimental gender treatments and surgeries.
This week, multiple reports indicated that another Chicago-based school, The University of Chicago, will offer a religious course in the 2023-2024 academic year titled “Queering God.”
According to the course description, it will include “queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies” and ask students to consider “Is God queer?” (via The University of Chicago):
Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies. We will analyze the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with new relational forms. Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all.
In an interview with The Daily Caller, Joseph Flores, student co-president of a Christian ministry organization on campus, said, “Progressive actors seek to conquer and remake God into some crude mockery in their own image.”
“The Christian God is without gender, without sex. To think of Him in such human terms and reduce Him to these categories is deeply disrespectful,” he explained. “The idea of ‘Queering God’ is, on its face, quite ridiculous. Simultaneously foolish and offensive, such a line of thinking is emblematic of the societal and spiritual decay we are suffering in our country today.”
Professor Olivia Bustion, who is teaching the course, reportedly received her Master of Divinity from UChicago. According to U.S. News and World Report, UChicago is the sixth-best university in the United States.
The Caller noted that the school previously offered a course called “The Problem of Whiteness” in 2022, which was eventually postponed. The course description explained that the seminar would “[examine] the problem of whiteness through an anthropological lens, drawing from classic and contemporary works of critical race theory.”
Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT, has been banned in some states over its divisiveness.