Patrick S. Cheng, Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Episcopal Divinity School, delivered the fourth annual Boswell Lecture on Thursday evening, April 28, 2011, titled, “The Rainbow Connection: Bridging Asian American and Queer Theologies.”

The Rainbow Connection: Bridging Asian American and Queer Theologies — will help to mark and celebrate an emerging queer religious scholarship among Asian Pacific Islander communities.

As Dr. Cheng describes it: “Rainbows have long served as bridges between different worlds: heaven and earth; east and west; queer and non-queer. In this lecture, I will suggest that the emergence of LGBTQ Asian Pacific Islander theological voices in recent years has created a hybrid space – or bridge – between Asian American and queer theologies. It is in this ‘rainbow space’ that previously-silenced connections between sexualities, gender identities, and races can emerge, and thus challenge and transform the dominant theological discourse.”

Speaker Biography:

The Rev. Dr. Patrick S. Cheng is the Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a B.A. from Yale College. Patrick is a contributor to the Huffington Post on LGBT theological issues, and he is an ordained minister with the Metropolitan Community Churches. He is the founder and coordinator of Queer Asian Spirit, a world-wide online community of LGBT people of Asian descent and their allies who are interested in issues of spirituality and religion. Patrick is the author of Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011). He has contributed chapters to The Queer Bible Commentary as well as the second edition of Sexuality and the Sacred. His writings have been published in Semeia, Spiritus, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Patrick lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his husband Michael, and they have been together for almost twenty years. For more information, see Patrick’s website.