“I wish I would’ve gotten here on time because I feel like I got here and it was like I jumped in when it was really intense and kind of dense,” he said. “I mean, the topic itself is pretty dense and it’s complex and it’s not something that can just be talked about or have questions answered all in one night or one hour.”

The book, “Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity,” and the presentation were crafted by the Rev. Elizabeth Edman. Edman, the first openly gay chaplain at Northwestern University, has been speaking on the topics of faith and sexuality for over 25 years, according to Rev. Sarah Midzalkowski.

Midzalkowski, a member of the MSU Religious Advisors Association, said that MSU’s campus is like a circus. There are so many different performers and experiences for students to engage in. This year, Midzalkowski said they wanted to focus on sexuality and spirituality.

“Our campus ministry tries to engage the intellectual and spiritual life of the students at the same time,” Midzalkowski said. “We wanted to bring someone who was a thinker, a theologian, and to be able to come and talk about her own writing.”

Before beginning her presentation on her book, Edman told her audience that she was going to get loud.

Edman said that her book contains two parts. The first one is about how queer people possess virtue according to the terms Christianity sets itself. The second part focuses on how Christians could learn from queer experience about how to make the church better.

“The central idea is that Christianity is—and must be—queer,” Edman said. “That’s why I argue that churches could learn so much about what we as Christians are called to be and do by paying attention to queer experience.”

When Edman says that Christianity should become queer, she is not saying that Christians should become sexually queer, she said. Rather, Christianity should share certain traits as the queer path. These include:

-Discerning an identity
-Telling others about it despite risk
-Touching others—both physically and spiritually
-Building community/adopted family
-Looking to the margins

Edman said that many have used Christianity as a way to back their prejudices against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.

“My hope for queer people reading this book, broadly, whether they identify as people of faith or not, is to address some of the spiritual damage that has been done against queer people in the name of religions,” she said. “I’m hoping that there’s some balm in this book for queer people, broadly.”

Some of her stylistic choices in the book have done some potential healing, Edman said. In the book, Edman refers to God using the transgender pronouns of ze and zir. Although she wasn’t expecting it, Edman said that many transgender people wrote her on the choice and said it was very meaningful for them to have God described in such a way.

“To me, that’s the power of this work is just to open up the idea that queer people know something about God, have access to God,” Edman said. “You know, bring gifts to bear. And there’s something in that that tells us something about who God is. The hunger for that is immense. And the faithfulness that people show in seeking it out is immense and that alone is part of what the church should be embracing as an extraordinary gift.”