Holy Cross fails to defend Catholic faith
There’s a word for Catholics who believe Jesus was into gay incest: Non-Catholics.
Or as they’re known at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester: “Professor.”
Tat-siong Benny Liew currently holds an endowed chair of New Testament studies in the religious studies department at Holy Cross. In 2009, he wrote an academic paper titled “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering Word Across Different Worlds.” If that appears to be incomprehensible gobbledygook to you, do not adjust your newspaper: It is.
“I am suggesting that John’s constant references to Jesus wanting water (4:7; 19:28), giving water (6:35) and leaking water (19:34) speak to Jesus’ gender indeterminacy and hence his cross-dressing and other queer desires,” Liew wrote. He also referred to Jesus as a “cross-dresser,” and suggested Jesus was putting the moves on his apostles and followers.
It’s the sort of inane, politicized pseudo-intellectualism that’s all too common on college campuses. What makes professor Liew’s sexobsessed prattling different is that he’s shaping young minds at what is theoretically a Catholic college. And the college, being the Massachusetts institute we all know it to be is, of course, defending its faith to defend the professor.
In a sense, they have to. After all, Holy Cross hired this genius knowing his academic writings. That’s pretty much the entire point of writing articles for “They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism.” It’s not like you’re going to find these journals on the family coffee table.
And yet, despite his (literally) unorthodox views, Liew’s been picking up a paycheck from the nominally papist college since 2013. If it weren’t for the work of a conservative campus magazine, The Fenwick Review, students and their tuitionpaying parents might never know of professor Liew’s writings.
Now that they do, Catholics who still hold fringe views like “The Bible is God’s word” or “Jesus is the son of God and wasn’t a gay cross-dresser” might have a few reservations about having this guy overseeing their kids’ education. Holy Cross’ answer to the Catholic faithful?
Get thee behind me, Haters!
“I know Professor Liew to be a dedicated teacher and an engaged scholar,” Holy Cross president the Rev. Philip Boroughs said in a statement, before defending the crossdressing Jesus theory under the guise of “academic freedom.”
Other liberal academics have joined in. The Rev. Eric Atcheson organized a letter defending Liew and his right “to the protections of academic freedom as a tenured professor.” He goes on to say Liew has “contributed to the spiritual enrichent of his students — not just the cisgendered students, but LGBTQ students as well.”
What is “cisgendered,” you ask? It’s a word used by people who think your sex is just a construct of society, not a biological fact, and “cis” means you happen to identify with the biological sex. Once again — it’s not your eyesight, dear reader. It’s the idiocy of the ideas.
If this were a secular college, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Once Harvard hired atheist chaplains, the notion of rigorous religious thought in secular academia was done.
Religious colleges are different — and that’s a good thing. Some people want a university experience that helps them more fully understand their faith and its teachings. That’s hard to do if the faculty rejects those teachings in favor of the theology of “Hot Apostle Nights III.”
For whatever reason, the alleged Catholics running Holy Cross don’t grasp this. You know who does? The Jewish professor who serves as faculty adviser to the campus magazine that broke the story.
“Speaking as an outsider, I can only make the analogy as a Jew: I would find it astounding (if) I were an alumnus of Yeshiva University and they had hired somebody to teach the things about Moses that this theologian says about Jesus. I found it astounding,” he told the Worcester Telegram.
Sadly, professor, I’m not “astounded” in the least.