(Download) "Converting the Church: Richard Rodriguez and the Browning of Catholicism (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Converting the Church: Richard Rodriguez and the Browning of Catholicism (Critical Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 250 KB
Description
Near the close of brown, his 2002 extended autobiographical essay, Richard Rodriguez describes the tension between being gay and being Catholic. First, he notes that to be a gay Catholic is often viewed as paradoxical, or somehow inauthentic: Rodriguez then goes on to explain that he has come to depend on the tension that results from being gay and Catholic. This irreconcilability is itself a part of his daily experience, constitutive of what he thinks of as "brownness," a capacious term that Rodriguez uses to connote everything from sodomy and impurity to religious syncretism and racial mixing. He writes that he was born Catholic, then asks, "Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay" (224). To be born both gay and Catholic means that Rodriguez must struggle with the contradiction of belonging to a church that rejects his sexual identity--his love for his partner is at odds with the institution that mediates his faith and love for his God.