RELIGION 2021 | Chapter Showcase LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS CHAPTER SHOWCASE FROM THE EDITOR For many years, Lexington Books has been a vanguard publisher in religion. Our editorial independence allows us to adopt a cross-denominational, multidisciplinary approach to our titles. We publish dynamic, high-caliber scholarship in not only the traditional fields of religious studies, but also with an increased awareness of communities and people on the margins of academic religious discourse. Our books seek to elevate and spotlight the intersectional nature of this field and publish works that will challenge and change the world outside of the classroom. This collection showcases some of the highlights of Lexington scholarship over the past year. Christophe D. Ringer phenomenologically explores mass incarceration and argues that necropolitics produces an eschatological hope by sacrificing the flourishing of predominantly marginalized black and Latinx communities. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim historically charts the influence enslaved African Muslims had on American Islam. In the realm of biblical exegesis, Janette H. Ok reads the exhortation to Christian wives to be subject and obey their husbands and compares the experiences of the original first-century Christian women addressed by the letter to modern Asian immigrant women in interracial marriages. We recognize that the impetus is on us to seek out new and diverse voices and not to wait for underrepresented scholars to find us. We especially invite authors from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented traditions to publish your next scholarly project with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, and revised dissertations by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published quickly. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers, and we market our new titles aggressively around the globe. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship including America’s Other Muslims which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Trevor Crowell, PhD. Associate Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS contents 4 - 24 Cody J. Sanders, “Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival,” in Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk 25 - 53 Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, “Africanizing Dixie: The Enslaved African Muslim Experience and the Black American Islamic Continuum,” in America’s Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam 54 - 70 Christophe D. Ringer, “The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration,” in Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America 71 - 89 Janette H. Ok, “You Have Become Children of Sarah: Reading 1 Peter 3:1–6 through the Intersectionality of Asian Immigrant Wives, Patriarchy, and Honorary Whiteness,” in Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity in Early Christian Texts, edited by Mitzi J. Smith and Jin Young Choi 90 - 129 Yongho Francis Lee, “The Spiral Dialectics of Cataphasis and Apophasis in Bonaventure,” in Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism: Ascent and Awakening in Bonaventure and Chinul The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Cody J. Sanders, “Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival,” in Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 29–49. Series: Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care. All Rights Reserved. TWO Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival The research I present in the following chapters emerges from many hours of recorded interviews I conducted with nine participants. These nine volunteered for the research out of their willingness to speak with me about the intersections of their sexual or gender identity, their relig- ious lives, and their suicide experience. Most of them did with the hope that their stories would provide some aide to other LGBTQ people in similar situations. And many also voiced a desire to help churches to become safer, more life-giving places for LGBTQ people as well. In the chapters to come, I put these narratives into conversation with the literature of philosophy, theology, psychology, and varied other dis- ciplines in order to identify themes that hold potential to shape practices of care in relation to LGBTQ lives. But before I begin extracting pieces of these lengthy interviews for critical examination, I believe it is important for readers to get to know these nine participants in a fuller sense than interview excerpts can provide. Ann Lowenhaupt Tsing says of stories, “we need to tell and tell until all our stories of death and near-death and gratuitous life are standing with us to face the challenges of the present. It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.”1 That is my hope in rendering these nine individu- als’ stories here. And that, too, was their hope when they first told their stories to me. 29 4 Lexington Books Religion Chapter Showcase 30 Chapter 2 THOMAS Thomas, forty-eight-years-old when we spoke, “wrestled” all his life with being gay and Christian. His father was a lay Unitarian minister and his uncles were also ministers. His paternal grandfather achieved only a fourth-grade education, but read the Bible exhaustively. This familial background typifies Thomas’s experience of religion as a child. “I sang in church when I was three years old. I believed in Christ from like a small boy and I wanted to be a minister since I was age six,” he explained. Thomas spoke of his adolescence in this atmosphere, saying, “I would participate in youth groups as best I could and feel these attractions for the other boys and know that one of the most powerful aspects of who I was was absolutely forbidden in any social circle in the community. So I stayed alone with it. I kept my faith in Christ. I always have.” He began drinking at age fifteen and taking drugs in college partially to deal with the sexual abuse he experienced as a ten-year-old at the hands of an older boy, and partially to deal with the growing “distance” he sensed between himself, the world, and the grace of God. By the time he was in college, Thomas had “let the whole church thing go” and attempted suicide first at age sixteen and several other times after that. He described, “going out into the car and closing the garage door and turning on the car and leaving it on. Just when I was going to pass out I’d turn it off and open the door and think . I didn’t know why I wanted to live but I didn’t know why I wanted to die.” Thomas also attempted overdosing on drugs on a couple of occasions. Once, after taking two hits of acid, Thomas recounts his most vivid attempt to end his life, saying, I became convinced on that day that the reality was that God was going to take everybody up and this was going to be hell . because there was something wrong with me. So I ran into this building and I ran up the stairs and a friend ran after me. I got to the top of the stairwell and I climbed over the railing and he pulled me back. And I threw him to the ground and wrestled him and I pinned him until he stopped strug- gling. He was okay, but he stopped struggling and let go of me. Then I climbed back over the stairwell. And I was praying the whole time, it was only prayer, just over and over again: “God, save me.” And I jumped off. And I inverted and I dropped about twenty feet, maybe a little more, and I landed on my face on concrete steps. And I didn’t pass out. I didn’t break bones. My nose hurt a little bit. I have no idea why I survived that. All throughout these attempts at suicide, even after having left regular church attendance behind, Thomas described showing up periodically at various services. Once, at a little church near the airport on the outside of town, he responded to an altar call when he heard a voice inside him saying, “Go up and pray.” At this church, he sensed that God didn’t want Lexington Books Religion Chapter Showcase 5 Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival 31 him to be gay or to drink or take drugs, so he stopped. He promptly broke up with his first boyfriend he had ever had and joined a Christian ministry on his college campus. Thomas, who describes himself as “a marrying kind of guy,” began dating a woman he had known since high school. “So she knew I had been gay and we both believed firmly—firmly—that if we had the right kind of faith we could make me straight,” he explained. So they got engaged. His mother took his wife-to-be aside and told her that Thomas was gay. “He won’t be after he gets married,” his fiancée assured her.