Found Out
Transgressive faith and sexuality
Alison Webster
Paperback |176 pp |216 x 135 mm
'Captures the confessions of those caught between norms of church or society and the realities of their lives, identities and sexualities.'
‘Theology for Alison Webster is not a sport or hobby. It is survival. Driven by the hard realities of experience and the imperative of injustice, she fearlessly dusts off the sources, norms and ends of theological imagining to reconstruct liberation and hope for those whose voice is seldom heard. If the Church, poised on its’ various tightropes, is trying to balance so hard that it becomes incapable of moving, then this is a timely book that interrupts our paralysis in the name of God, calling us out, like Lazarus, to find ourselves loved to the point of tears.’
‘Reading this book is a profound, I would say, sacramental experience. By hearing into speech the compelling stories of a range of extraordinary women, Webster reveals the Christ who transgresses all boundaries and invites us to play with him on the edges of our identities. Webster offers some signposts for the Church as it attempts to reverse itself out of the cul-de-sac it is currently caught up in over issues sexuality. Such a journey will involve turning from systems into the faces of those marginalised by them, but in those faces we will find the Christ who waits for us all with love, forgiveness and hope.’
More than twenty years after writing Found Wanting, her influential critique of Christian teachings about women’s sexuality, Alison Webster explores the experiences of women whose spiritual lives have developed and flourished outside the strict demands and expectations of the traditional Church. Found Out presents these women’s stories and, in the voices of the marginalised and transgressive, discovers the beginnings of a new language for making sense of life, for speaking of God and of spirituality.