christianity social tolerance and homosexuality

Also included are discussions of Boswell’s career, including his influence among gay and lesbian Christians and his role in academic debates between essentialists and social constructionists.Įlegant and thought-provoking, this collection provides a fitting twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to the incalculable influence of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and its author. The essays in this magnificent volume examine a variety of aspects of Boswell’s interpretation of events in the development of sexuality from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, including a Roman emperor’s love letters to another man suspicions of sodomy among medieval monks, knights, and crusaders and the gender-bending visions of Christian saints and mystics. The Boswell Thesis brings together fifteen leading scholars at the intersection of religious and sexuality studies to comment on this book’s immense impact, the endless debates it generated, and the many contributions it has made to our culture. Twenty-five years later, the aftershocks still reverberate. Arguing that neither the Bible nor the Christian tradition was nearly as hostile to homoeroticism as was generally thought, its initial publication sent shock waves through university classrooms, gay communities, and religious congregations. 'Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality', still fiercely relevant today, helped form the disciplines of gay and gender studies, and it continues to illuminate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force.Few books have had the social, cultural, and scholarly impact of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consulted make this one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history. John Boswell's National Book Award-winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members - among them priests, bishops, and even saints - when it was first published twenty-five years ago.

2: Texts and Translations Frequently Cited Works Index of Greek Terms General Index.11: Intellectual Change: Men, Beasts, and 'Nature'.9: The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages.

Christianity social tolerance and homosexuality