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T&T Clark Enquiries in Embodiment, Sexuality, and Social Ethics is premised on the belief that sexuality and embodiment are integral to understanding religious traditions and their faith communities. In this series, authors reflect on holistic and embodied selves in cultural and religious contexts, attending to material and social existence. The series foregrounds sexuality as a dimension of embodiment, understood relationally in the broadest sense, encompassing attitudes, orientations, passions, and self-expression. The focus on social ethics requires sustained attention to social and historical context, critical thinking, and practices of lived religion in community.

Sexuality is an especially challenging topic for theological and religious studies classrooms as well as faith communities. Few topics are as personal, embodied, culturally dependent, political, and moralized. Furthermore, attitudes about sexuality are often bound up in issues of shame, guilt, power, and freedom. This series invites readers into critical awareness and intentionality when learning about sexuality and embodiment within Christian thought and practice.

A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive, the first volume in this series, is an exemplar of critical thinking and progressive scholarship. Elyse Ambrose’s turn to oral history and visual archive amplifies the voices of Black queer authors as scholarly sources while providing the necessary introductions and histories to ground students prior to engaging their constructive ethical arguments. Ambrose combines historical research and current-day oral history to fill a major gap in sexuality, embodiment, and ethics literature from a Christian perspective. By centering Black queer persons as sources for moral and ethical reflection, Ambrose adeptly demonstrates an intersectional approach that relies upon queer theory archival methods, critical race theory, and Christian sexual ethics. This approach also models a new transdisciplinary methodology that aligns with the series mission to provide forward-thinking treatment of a specific topic within a general introduction to sexuality and embodiment.

Three features of A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics make it a must read for religious practitioners, students, and scholars. It includes a history of Christian sexual ethics methodology, mapping significant social and religious developments paying close attention to racial differences and shifting gender and sexual diversities in service of proposing a new methodological approach. It captures a genealogy of Black queer theological and ethical discourse using archival approaches that focus on everyday lived experiences from Black Harlemites in the 1920’s to Blackqueer spiritual expressions of today. This text also demonstrates the value of transdisciplinary work for cutting edge conversations on race, sexuality, and ethics. Thus, this text transforms current approaches and challenges future endeavors in Christian sexual ethics by robustly addressing the intersections of sexuality, embodiment, and faith.



Proposals for this series will:

- Adopt an intersectional approach using tools of social analysis to conceptualize, interpret, and analyze the ethics of sexuality and embodiment, broadly construed.

- Reflect on holistic and embodied selves in cultural and religious contexts, attending to race, gender, and other aspects of material and social existence.

- Provide forward-thinking treatment of a specific topic within or general introduction to sexuality and embodiment, with attention to issues such as reproductive justice, trauma, race relations, violence, and more.

- Engage a wide range of methodological approaches, with an emphasis on integrating theory and praxis, doctrine and lived faith, ideology and material existence. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches are encouraged, engaging with social/behavioral, biomedical, and physical sciences as well as critical approaches within theological discourse, such as queer theology, critical race theory, and post-coloniality.

- Promote critical thinking and progressive scholarship pertaining to ministerial leadership, healthy sexuality, and holistic attention to embodied realities (even in digital spaces).

- Address the primary audience of seminary and graduate students in theology and ethics, in addition to advanced undergraduates and reflective practitioners.


Reach out to members of the editorial or advisory board with your interest or questions in the series:

Editorial Board

Monique Moultrie, Associate Professor, African-American Studies, Religious Studies, Georgia State University, mmoultrie@gsu.edu

Kate Ott, Jerre and Mary Joy Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics and Director of the Stead Center for Ethics and Values, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, kate.ott@garrett.edu

Darryl W. Stephens, Director of United Methodist Studies and Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ministry, Lancaster Theological Seminary, dws@darrylwstephens.com

Advisory Board members:

Xochitl Alvizo, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the area of Women and Religion and the Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, California State University, Northridge

Jennifer Leath, Queen's National Scholar and Assistant Professor in Black Religions, the School of Religion at Queen’s University

Keun-Joo Christine Pae, Chair of the Religion Department and Associate Professor of Religion/Ethics and Women's and Gender Studies, Denison University (NOTE: also serving on the editorial board of T&T Clark's new series of feminist theology)

Melissa Pagán, Associate Professor, Religious Studies; Director, Graduate Religious Studies Program; Director, Spiritual Direction Certificate Program, Mount Saint Mary's University (CA)

Jeremy Posadas, Hal S. Marchman Chair of Civic and Social Responsibility; Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Gender Studies, Stetson University

Roger Sneed, Professor of Religion, Furman University