Authors meet respondents: Black, Quare, and Then to Where: Theories of Justice and Black Sexual Ethics (Duke, 2023) and Queering Black Churches: Dismantling Heteronormativity in African American Congregations (Oxford, 2024)

In Black, Quare, and Then to Where, Jennifer Leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Maât the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Brandon Thomas Crowley’s Queering Black Churches explores Black open and affirming (ONA) congregations and their congregants and, in doing so, offers a critique of Black heteronormativity as well as a contextual approach to Queering African American churches. This panel invites Leath and Crowley to engage in discussion around their new books focusing on themes of black queer religious subjectivity, black sexual ethics, queer and quare critique, and the intersections of history, ethics, ethnography, and theology in the contemporary study of black religion and sexuality.