Centre for Religion and Public Life

2025/2026 seminars

9 October – Rabbi Dr. Barbara Thiede (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA)

Centuries of Jewish and Christian exegetes have made strenuous efforts to redeem, justify, and explain away the difficult, even violent god of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. Biblical scholars have often supported this effort. This is not only true for the cisgender, heterosexual, and male scholars of the global North who have dominated the field. Feminist scholars, Queer Scholars, and scholars of masculinity have also -- often with the best of intentions -- worked to mitigate and ameliorate the deity’s character, nature, and doings. The outcome, however, has been harmful, particularly for children, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and persons of colour. In this presentation, Barbara Thiede asks whether religious leaders and scholars can help change practice, teaching, and real-world conditions for the better if they abandon any attempt to “fix” the biblical god. How would such an approach affect religion, religious practice, and learning in classrooms across the globe? And what God is left to us when we acknowledge the divine character and life we find in biblical texts?

23 October – Zaynab Ango (University of Abuja, Nigeria)

This paper examines the centrality of Islam to queer agency in two Hausa digital novels, Auren Jinsi (“Same-Sex Marriage,” 2022) and Danyen Kasko (“The Unbroken Pot,” 2022). The Hausa culture in Northern Nigeria has for centuries been shaped by Islamic teachings, which regulate sexual relations and orientations. Yet, this paper contends that Islam is amenable to queer agency, as portrayed in the novels. The paper further contends that the emergence of digital publishing, its offerings of anonymity and accessibility, now offers a medium for self-assertion that is deconstructing heteronormative hermeneutics. Drawing insights from the notion of “appropriation” in postcolonial theories, the paper unpacks the authors’ strategies of interpreting Qur’anic injunctions to challenge heteronormative discourses, and of constructing queer identities and moral authority within Islam. This unveils religion as a productive “site for queer agency,” and digital literature as an alternative archive for Hausa queer lived experience.