Transformations

Controversies in Contextual Theology

by Marcella Althaus-Reid (editor)

Trans/formations is a new addition to "SCM's Controversies in Contextual Theology" series. Like anything coming from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, it is controversial and challenging as well as highly original. The book will: make visible a range of trans lived experience [transgendered and transsexual], offer theological reflection on these experiences, create challenging theology from this experiential base, and provide a resource for churches and theology students not to date available. It includes an excellent range of contributors, including Elizabeth Stuart and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is a valuable addition to reading lists of courses on religion, gender and the body.

Genres: Religion, Queer, Nonfiction, Theology, LGBT

218 pages, ebook

First published October 30, 2009

About the author

Marcella Althaus-Reid was Professor of Contextual Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. When appointed, she was the only woman professor of theology at a Scottish University, and the first woman professor of theology at New College in its 160 year history.

She graduated with a Bachelor in Theology Degree from ISEDET, the Protestant University Institute in Buenos Aires. She completed her Ph.D at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her interests included Liberation Theology, Feminist theology and Queer Theology.

Prof Althaus-Reid died on Friday 20 February 2009, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Reviews

[deven · Rating 2 out of 5]

would be 5 stars if its intent was to demonstrate how bad it is for cis people to write trans theory.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection has aged remarkably quickly and strangely. Here in 2021 the majority of the language used to describe trans experience in these pages has simply vanished, replaced with something new and, in my view better, but also less abrasive, less confronting and visceral than what is on display here. For here we have the first formations of any kind of trans theology. Just 12 years ago we had nothing, and then there was this, something. There is an anger behind a lot of these writings that cannot be denied, an anger in the process of being born. And so its concerns begin already to slip into history, and chafe against the work I want to do here and now. Where these texts for the most part want to flatten and destroy in order to allow for the full flourishing of human expression, here I want to affirm everyone’s categories and labels as gifts which form the world. Things that are not of ‘ultimate’ importance are still important, and who is anyone to say what is and is not ultimate, for is any aspect of life ultimate, or only life itself?