Queer Theory and the Church of Jesus Christ

If you go to the home page of the Interpreter Foundation, you will find that the page has been fundamentally redesigned.  It may take a while for you to become wholly accustomed to it, but I hope that you’ll come to appreciate it.  The changes are very far from merely superficial and cosmetic.  I’m very grateful to Allen Wyatt and Alan Sikes and the others from our side who saw this through to its current results.

And you will also find a new article there: “Intellectual Colonialism and Air Bud Theology: More on Queer Theory and the Church of Jesus Christ,” written by Gregory L. Smith:

Abstract: Taylor Petrey’s Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos attempts to “queer” Latter-day Saint concepts to create an account more congenial to queer theory, a postmodern philosophy and approach to texts. Here the aim is to destabilize and deny sexual essentialism, the law of chastity, and the eternal destiny of humanity as understood by the Saints. The words of Church leaders are misrepresented through omission and reorganization. Readings of Latter-day Saint scholars and scripture likewise suffer distortion and inaccurate representation. The work betrays several double standards, including the intellectual colonialism inherent in the efforts to distort and thereby appropriate Latter-day Saint culture and writings for its own purposes. Means to avoid this negative pattern are suggested, including rigorous honesty in textual claims and the participation of the scholarly community in effective peer review of irresponsible or misleading work.

I’ve drawn several times previously here from the 2024 book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), which was written by the Anglo-American physician and medical researcher Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D.  

As I’ve mentioned here before, Dr. Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where, additionally, he serves as director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which is his area of specialized medical research. He also directs the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton, in England.  He received his medical degree in 1995 from the medical school of King’s College London and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007.  He also received fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of London and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

I bring Dr. Parnia up here again for a quite specific reason:  Some skeptics refuse to consider what are commonly labeled near-death experiences or NDEs as evidence that at least hints at the survival of human consciousness or personality beyond death because, they say, people who have undergone NDEs were, by definition, not really dead.  If they had really been dead, the reasoning goes, they wouldn’t have returned.  Instead, they were — again by sheer definition — only near death.  Accordingly, their reported experiences can have no real bearing on our understanding of death and dying, let alone on our ideas of what happens to human consciousness beyond death.

I suspect that, for many who have actually spent a considerable amount of time studying near-death experiences, this will seem a bit sophistical.  It certainly seems so to me.  In fact, it reminds me more than a little of pre-modern physics as it was done in the Aristotelian tradition (in other words, not only by Aristotle himself but by such brilliant thinkers as Ibn Sīnā or Avicenna), which basically involved reasoning in a vacuum about the meanings or applications of words, using logical deductions from definitions without performing any experiments, let alone stepping into a laboratory.

It is at least partially for that reason, I think, that Dr. Parnia himself prefers to call NDEs “recalled experiences of death” or REDs.  And I’m beginning to recognize the value of his neologism 

He considers the term near-death experience inaccurate since, in his considered and data-driven opinion, death is a surprisingly (though, obviously, not an indefinitely or infinitely) reversible process. He also uses the phrase after-death experiences as a preferred term, explaining that these experiences occur after the heart, lungs, and brain have ceased functioning during a period of cardiac arrest. By describing them as “after-death experiences” or “recalled experiences of death” he is highlighting his position that such experiences, when properly classified and accurately understood, do indeed occur during a state of actual death rather than merely near death.  Please remember that his research focuses on the experiences of patients during cardiac arrest, which is biologically synonymous with death, as opposed to the more general term “near-death.”  (It’s probably also worth noting that Dr. Parnia describes himself as non-religious.)

Finally, it’s time to revisit the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ for a trio of Terrible Tidbits of Terror:

• “Church Works with Food Bank of Alaska to Bring ‘Thanksgiving Blessing'”
• “How the BYU football team created a ‘miracle’ for these young fans from Minnesota: When the Hulls lost their dad unexpectedly, the team gave them memories they will never forget”. Can you imagine how much better things would have been had the players all been atheists and the sponsoring school not been run by theocrats?
• “No humbug, Utah is second-most festive state in U.S.”  One of the many very ways in which Utah, the center-place of the Morgbots or Mor(m)ons is a living Hell on Earth.

I’m not sure whether this came from the Hitchens File or not.  Clearly, though, since, as the great Master Hitchens himself revealed, “religion poisons everything,” Utah’s dominant faith must have had a negative impact here, as well:  “Utah’s Beehive Cheese earns global recognition at World Cheese Awards”  I would love to have been in Bern for this competition.  Heck, I would just love to have been in Bern, competition or no competition.