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Featured Book for April 2023

Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith

by Mihee Kim-Kort

Mihee Kim-Kort is a wife, a mom, and a Presbyterian minister. And she’s queer. As she became aware of her queer sexuality, Mihee wondered what that meant for her spirituality. But instead of pushing her away from God, it brought her closer to Jesus and taught her how to love better. In Outside the Lines, Mihee shows us how God, in Jesus, is oriented toward us in a radical way. Through the life, work, and witness of Jesus, we see a God who loves us with a queer love, and our faith in that God becomes a queer spirituality–a spirituality that crashes through definitions and moves us outside of the categories of our making. Whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we live out this spirituality in the world. With a captivating mix of personal story and biblical analysis, Outside the Lines shows us how each of our bodies fits into the body of Christ. Outside the lines and without exceptions.

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Community Questions

Community questions for reflection by Claudia Love Mair.

Week One

  1. Have you ever had an experience like Mihee’s where you were mistaken for a gender or orientation that you are not? What did that feel like?
  2. According to Mihee, what does it mean to be queer?
  3. Who is queer?

Week Two

  1. What is your response to Mihee’s assertion that Jesus is queer?
  2. If as Christians we've tended to demonize and vilify sex, it is not unlikely that we also distrust pleasure. How does the idea of desiring and loving a desiring God challenge your ideas around pleasure?
  3. "A queer spirituality challenges the compartments that we, not God, have created." p. 23. What compartment of your own making are you inspired to step out of?

Week 3

  1. “A queer spirituality encourages us toward candid questioning what stirs our hearts." p. 23. What is the thing that stirs your heart that you may have not queried as much as perhaps you should have?
  2. “A queer spirituality urges us not to blindly accept what culture gives us, but to interrogate it thoughtfully, wholeheartedly, and prayerfully." p.23. Give an example of how this kind interrogation might look in your life.
  3. What kind of liberation from gender constraints does queerness offer?

Week 4

  1. On page 53 Mihee writes about the effects of queering welcome. Name a time you saw how queering hospitality welcomed someone into a spiritual space where they may have previously been unwelcome.
  2. “Queerness embraces and cultivates weirdness.” p.100. In what ways, if any, are you weird?
  3. “Queerness takes make up, clothing, shoes, gestures, and voices and uses them as materials for play.” p. 154-155. Drag performers are currently under attack in the United States. How important is it that this particular kind of queer play be safe and protected?