Church (it’s a bar!): Theological parody(?) at Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium

This paper considers the places of theological reflection through an analysis of the “Christian kitsch-themed” and art space Atlanta bar, Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium. Drawing on Melissa Wilcox’s notion of serious parody and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading, this paper considers how Sister Louisa’s queer parody of American Christianity does not merely subvert or resist their normativities paranoically but re-presents and re-imagines theology in ways that reactivate its teachings, precisely where much of contemporary Christianity has become inured to it. , CHURCH performs in space what queer theology has claimed in text: to consciously pose to theology a serious of questions that expose, destabilize, and repurpose its sexual, political, and economic investments and sureties. And perhaps, even more than that, it may be church in more than name alone.