Christian Scriptures: Sexual Outsiders and the Love Ethic
Wed, May 27
|Boston
Jesus, Paul, eunuchs, sex workers, and women leaders — explore how the Christian Scriptures disrupt sexual norms and ground in love and inclusion. Rev. Dr. Debra Haffner
Time & Location
May 27, 2026, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM EDT
Boston, 66 Marlborough St, Boston, MA 02116, USA
About the event
Christian Scriptures: Sexual Outsiders and the Love Ethic
Lecture 2: The Bible and Sexuality
by Rev. Dr. Debra Haffner
Response by Rev. Devlin Scott
Like the Hebrew Bible, the books of the Christian Scriptures feature sex workers, eunuchs, women with multiple husbands, nonmonogamy, and adults living in more than a dozen forms of intimate relationships. Rather than presenting a single model of sexual morality, these texts portray a wide range of relationships that still challenge our social, religious, and sexual norms.
In this lecture, Haffner will begin with the transgressive women named in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. She will then explore Jesus’s encounters with sexual and social outsiders, including the Samaritan woman at the well (John), the woman accused of adultery (John), and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts). The lecture will also examine the central role of women in Jesus’s life and ministry, as well as…