Book Launch: Queer Thriving in Religious Schools

Join the author, Dr Seán Henry, and expert discussants for the book launch of the monograph Queer Thriving in Religious Schools at 6.30pm, Wed 24th July 2024.

You can join in person (Hub 1, Main Building, Edge Hill University) or online via MS Teams (register to access the link).

Event programme

• 6.30 – 6.45pm: Introduction and welcome
• 6.45 – 7.15pm: Opening paper from Professor Graham McDonough, University of Victoria
• 7.15 – 8.00pm: Conversation with panellists from Edge Hill University: Professor David Aldridge, Dr Francis Farrell, Dr Heather Marshall, and Dr Maggie Webster
• 8.00 – 8.30pm: Q&A and closing

Information about the book

This book offers an account of religious schooling committed to ‘queer-thriving’ and envisions how queer staff and students can live their lives without being ‘accommodated’ within heteronormative religious traditions.

Engaging with queer theological perspectives across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the book begins by situating queer thriving as a viable part of the work of the religious school, and not just as something reserved for progressive education more broadly. Taking three areas that are typically used to justify religious heteronormativity (religious texts, religious values, religious rituals), it engages queer theologies to showcase how an educational approach committed to queer thriving can be enacted in religious schools in ways that are also theologically sensitive. The book then explores how religious school communities can navigate differences around queerness and religion in ways that are supportive of queer staff and students. It takes desire as an everyday reality in classrooms and applies a queer lens to this to challenge heteronormativity and to imagine alternative modes of relationship between staff, students, and communities that enable queer staff and students to thrive.

Showcasing possibilities of resistance for the opposition between religious and queer concerns, it will appeal to researchers, postgraduates and academics in the fields of religion and education, whilst also benefitting those working across philosophy of education and educational theory, sex education, sociology of education, social justice education, queer theologies, religious studies, and sociology of religion.