Queer Thriving In Catholic Education

This book provides readers with the opportunity to go beyond anecdote and supposition in order to get a fuller grasp of research around Catholic education and LGBTQ+ matters. This is an edited collection of chapters which explores LGBTQ+ matters in relation to Catholic education. Although the field of Catholic Education Studies has grown exponentially over the past two decades, little if any attention has been published specifically about the place of LGBTQ+ students (and teachers) in the context of Catholic education. This edited book presents the various strands of research about Catholic education and LGBTQ+ inclusion. More specifically, this edited book of chapters addresses a number of broader themes including: • Is it possible for Catholic education to sit in harmony with the concerns of LGBTQ+ inclusive education? • What does it mean to ‘queer’ education at all? How does this sit in relation to Catholic perspectives on the purpose of Catholic education? • When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues in relation to Catholic education, what is the research agenda? • How might Catholic schools move beyond a ‘pastoral accommodation’ approach to LGBTQ+ students? • What does the evidence from research in Catholic schools indicate? Are they places of inclusion, hospitality, and welcome for LGBTQ+ young people?

Make sure your Catholic school's LGBT students are getting the support they need Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is a comprehensive training guidebook for educators who are committed to diversity and the full inclusion of LGBT students in every aspect of the Catholic high school experience. Based on five years of pilot testing in Catholic schools, this unique book emphasizes safe-staff training in integrating the Church's pastoral, social, and moral dimensions with the special needs of LGBT students. The book presents strategies and resources for building safer schools, helpful materials for communicating with parents, and general guidelines for developing and maintaining professional helping relationships with LGBT students. Based on a "training the trainer" model, Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students encourages the development of grassroots leadership within the school. This unique book promotes a positive framework for navigating the challenging landscape of the Catholic tradition and the LGBT experience as it helps to establish anti-harassment and anti-bullying protocols for school environments and models for developing LGBT student support groups and gay/straight student alliances. The book promotes role-play by students, alumni, teachers, and parents--a hallmark of the ministry work and training methods of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities--and is flexible enough to allow each school's individual climate and culture to be respected. Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students includes: * first-hand stories from students and teachers * realistic, dynamic, and creative role-play scenarios that explore various relationships between students, teachers, parents, administrators, and the school board * opening prayer and meditation rituals * a special foreword by Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, one of the few Catholic bishops to publicly affirm LGBT persons * an extensive bibliography and glossary regarding the experiences, language, culture, and spirituality of LGBT youth * the latest research findings on at-risk behaviors of LGBT teenagers * training handouts that are easy to duplicate and use as transparencies * a manual log that can be used as a training diary * and much more!Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is an essential resource for faculty and staff members at Catholic high schools, particularly school administrators, chaplains, campus ministers, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

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.

How does one reconcile the tension between the community of one’s own Catholic upbringing and a sexuality and gender identity that may be in conflict with some of the tenets of the faith – especially when one is a member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex community? Queer and Catholic offers a source of comfort to members of these communities, focusing on not only practicing Catholics, but also the entire experience of growing up Catholic. This unique book discusses Catholicism beyond its religiosity and considers its implications as a culture of origin. This widely varied and entertaining book pulls together a comprehensive collection of essays, stories, and poetry that together represent an honest and engaging reflection of being a queer person within the Catholic experience.

The only study of its kind, Being Gay and Lesbian in a Catholic High School offers compelling evidence to Catholic educators, clergy, and laypeople that their superb academic institutions are not fulfilling the clear mandate of the Church on inclusive, loving behavior toward sexual minorities. This powerful and moving book presents personal testimonies and an original study of Catholic students' attitudes toward gays and lesbians, as well as reprinting the actual teachings of the Church on homosexuals and homosexuality. To view an excerpt online, find the book in our QuickSearch catalog at www.HaworthPress.com.

Fortunate Families addresses the experience of Catholic parents who love their gay sons and lesbian daughters. The book had its genesis in a descriptive survey of over 200 such parents. It integrates results from the survey, church documents and stories so readers can access what they need most. Some readers will search for accurate information about Catholic teaching, others may connect with the lived experience of other Catholic parents. Still others will find examples of ministerial advocacy and support within the Catholic Church. Fortunate Families has all this and more. Conventional wisdom emphasizes the stories of parents who react to the news that their child is gay in verbally or physically abusive ways. These stories are told so often they take on an aura of normalcy. But there are other stories - of parents who struggle against the pressures of society and church to find and believe in the goodness of their gay child. It is critically important for parents to hear the stories of others who walked the same road before them-who have come through the experience closer to their gay or lesbian child, and who are willing to work to make the church more welcoming. Equally important is the opportunity for pastoral ministers to hear the voices of these parents and understand the need for outreach and pastoral care for gay and lesbian Catholics and their families. Fortunate Families will help prepare pastoral ministers help families come out of their isolation, work through their confusion and pain, and celebrate how fortunate they actually are.

Winner of a 2015 Catholic Press Award: Gender Issues Category (First Place). In this first book from an openly lesbian and celibate Catholic, widely published writer and blogger Eve Tushnet recounts her spiritual and intellectual journey from liberal atheism to faithful Catholicism and shows how gay Catholics can love and be loved while adhering to Church teaching. Eve Tushnet was among the unlikeliest of converts. The only child of two atheist academics, Tushnet was a typical Yale undergraduate until the day she went out to poke fun at a gathering of philosophical debaters, who happened also to be Catholic. Instead of enjoying mocking what she termed the “zoo animals,” she found herself engaged in intellectual conversation with them and, in a move that surprised even her, she soon converted to Catholicism. Already self-identifying as a lesbian, Tushnet searched for a third way in the seeming two-option system available to gay Catholics: reject Church teaching on homosexuality or reject the truth of your sexuality. Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith is the fruit of Tushnet’s searching: what she learned in studying Christian history and theology and her articulation of how gay Catholics can pour their love and need for connection into friendships, community, service, and artistic creation.

Aimed at gays and their families, this book takes a compassionate and pastoral approach to how the Catholic Church cares for gay people and will work with them.