Our churches need to go back to what we "know" and look deeper. Perhaps this is what theology and so much of religious work is. Aspects of Christian tradition are often taken for granted and those of us in dominant cultural positions often neglect the questions of how we got here and whether we should have (and I think the answer is most often "no"). Christianity has bound itself to Western imperialism in ways that have embedded such imperialism into our readings of the text in damaging ways. What is liberating in some contexts is oppressive in others-- the work of queering theology is the work of unraveling normativity and its tendency toward oppressive categorization. The image of prism helps us see these unraveled strands more clearly by separating unique interplays with the source material (light). Our contextual lenses inform our readings of the text in ways that affect meaning and in ways that we are blind to, particularly if we belong to "categories" that operate in oppressive roles/are higher on the (unjust) "hierarchy" that our cultural lenses impose. The prism allows me to access memory that is not my own in order to hope and work toward a world where our shared memory and experience informs our movement forward.
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