University of Portland offers ‘queer theologies’ course

A private Roman Catholic university in Oregon is reorganizing its theology department next fall, enabling students to substitute a mandatory upper-level biblical texts course with classes that explore subjects such as “queer theologies.”

The University of Portland, which was founded in 1901 and is affiliated with the Congregation of Holy Cross, is expanding its department of theology to include “religious studies,” allowing students the “autonomy” to align their studies with their faith traditions, according to The College Fix.

The Beacon, the university’s student newspaper, explained earlier this year that theology students must still take a 100-level theology course — or THE 105 — that includes biblical text study as a core requirement.

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Starting next academic year, the previously requisite “THE 205: Biblical Texts in Global Context” can be swapped out from a catalog that allows students to “pick from a variety of upper-division courses to fulfill their second theology requirement,” according to the Beacon.

One such offering includes “THE 362: Queer Theologies,” which “introduces, explores, and evaluates queer Christian theologies,” according to the course description.

“Examining sources and methods within this burgeoning theological sub-field, it traces developments of queer(ing) theologies—from early turns to Scripture/doctrine affirming same-sex relationships, to efforts revising theologies in light of queer lives—and considers key themes, future possibilities, and impacts on ecclesial and public contexts,” the description adds.

“THE 400: God Our Mother” aims to use The Catechism of the Catholic Church to “affirm that ‘God transcends the human distinction between the sexes’ and explore various ways of envisioning God that go beyond the image of a male God.”

Other courses include one about “the intersectionality of gender discrimination with other forms of discrimination” and another on “intercultural feminist theology.”

David Turnbloom, Ph.D., an associate professor who serves as the department’s interim chair, told the Beacon that religious studies “helps us equip and prepare our students to be better global citizens.”

After UP students cried when a priest objected to the display of an LGBT flag on campus in 2022, Turnbloom penned an op-ed on Good Friday likening those who oppose the “Queer community” to the centurions who nailed Jesus to the cross, as noted by The College Fix.

“The anger of the Queer community is a grace-filled, divine instrument,” he wrote at the time. “The question for Catholics is: do we have the competence to see our sin? Without this competence, any courageous acts of ministry run the risk of simply continuing the crucifixion.”

Turnbloom also exhorted his presumably Catholic readers to “stop trying to unite our suffering to Jesus’ suffering and instead be willing to recognize that our violence is united to the violence of the centurion.”

“Perhaps then, like the centurion, we can begin to recognize the presence of Christ in the Queer community where we have been so consistently denying it,” he continued. “Perhaps then, we will have the competence to see the beauty and dignity of the queer love that we have been crucifying. We can instead unite our voice with the centurion’s voice and say, ‘Truly, these are the children of God.'”

Turnbloom did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.

C.J. Doyle, who serves as executive director of the Catholic Action League, blasted the course offerings from the ostensibly Catholic institution as “functional apostasy” that exemplifies “how faithful Catholics have been dispossessed of their own institutions by modernist heretics.”

“Courses in ‘Queer Theologies,’ ‘God our Mother’ and ‘Trickery, Gender, Power and Politics in the Bible’ represent a radical rejection of Catholic Faith and Morals, the institutionalization of heterodoxy,” Doyle continued in a statement to The College Fix.

“And the arrogant conviction that Catholic higher education belongs not to the Church nor to the Catholic community, but to an entitled class of culturally conforming academics who believe themselves unconstrained by any fidelity to the Catholic truth, or to ecclesiastical authority,” he added.