A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church

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Perhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it t

Reviews

"A House of Prayer for All People complicates the common narrative about the seemingly natural and insurmountable divide between LGBT people and religion. Through an examination of the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto and its Pastor, The Rev, Brent Hawkes, Seitz elegantly engages with questions of sexual orientation, race, gender, religion as they are intertwined with social justice activism and the nature of citizenship. Drawing his narrative across local, national and transnational sites, Seitz build a nuanced and complex conceptual framing in order to repair religion and religious spaces for queer people. In doing so he strives to open a space for more capacious (yet precarious) possibilities beyond contemporary identity politics."Catherine J. Nash, Brock University

"David Seitzs rendition of the politics of refuge within faith community in Toronto is challenging, insightful, empirically rich, and conceptually bold. Seitz offers improper queer citizenship as a messy, unfinished political project. His analysis is essential reading that grows more pressing with each passing day."Alison Mountz, author of Seeking Asylum

"This a good book for bad times. It models a generous and nuanced mode of critique and thus will be excellent for teaching undergraduate and graduate students. It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist and postcolonial theory to the service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitzs point."Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

"In this book, Seitz beautifully gets at the diffuse nature of power and makes a strong case for the need for constant vigilance and rethinking within queer politics and scholarship. He challenges the notion that there are good or bad queer objects and easily identifiable queer heroes and victims. Further, he traverses the historical and the contemporary in compelling ways, and weaves together an analysis that impressively crosses scales, taking the reader from the body and the building (of the church) to the nation and the globe in ways that give us a rich evocation of the problematics and promises of the city of Toronto. A House of Prayer for All People is, in short, a useful work of queer auto critique."Natalie Oswin, McGill University

"To take an intimate space of a church seriously as a site of social change requires an understanding of its limitations, in this case particularly with regards to racism and ethnocentrism; humility and playfulness in what we consider to be appropriate subjects within a queer radical frame; and openness to the surprising radical possibilities of unexpected places. I particularly enjoyed reading Seitzs description of this life-affirming, though problematic, space."Farhang Rouhani, University of Mary Washington

"First-rate work . . . for far too long, the shadow of a puritanical, misunderstood, and ultimately false form of Christianity has overshadowed our scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. This book provides a helpful and eloquent correction."Reading Religion

"Seitz weaves together issues of citizenship, religion, queer identity and politics in an empirically rich, nuanced and complex study that will be of interest to queer scholars, migration scholars and those who refuse the notion that religion and sexuality must always be diametrically opposed."Emotion, Space and Society

"This book provides a solid description of activists who know the importance of recognizing and critiquing institutional and structural problems."Mobilization

"It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist, and postcolonial theory in service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitzs point."Society and Space

"Seitzs major contribution to queer geographic literature in this book is not only his merging of geographic and queer theories, but also his willingness to dive into the realm of faith and spirituality... Few geographers are inclined to tackle faith, religion, and/or spirituality in their work beyond using spiritual affiliations as ethnographic descriptors. A House of Prayer for All People certainly takes on this call."Antipode

"A House of Prayer deserves to be taught widely across a range of classes from queer studies to religion/secularism and globalism, from comparative examinations of ethnography to religion and citizenship, from critical considerations of humanitarianism to courses on religion and media."Religious Studies Review

Author Bio

David K. Seitz is assistant professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.