Samuel Ernest

Samuel Ernest is a doctoral candidate in theology in his final year at Yale. His dissertation, Delicate Ties: Gay Theology, AIDS, and the Church, draws on the lives and writings of two De La Salle Christian Brothers to offer a selective but deep history of the development of gay theology from the Second Vatican Council’s reforms to religious life and the social movements of the 1960s through the early decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The dissertation interweaves biography, constructive theology, American religious history, and close readings of novels, poems, and journals to recover gay theologies of fraternity and priesthood, of life amidst death.

 

Ernest is the founding publisher and editor of Homodoxy, a small press for gay/queer theology and literature, and was for two years an assistant editor at The Yale Review. His academic writing has appeared in Literature and Theology, The Polyphony: Conversations Across the Medical Humanities, and is forthcoming from Theology and Sexuality, for whom he is guest editing a special issue. His nonfiction and life writing has been published by Longreads, Annulet, Cephalophore, and in Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series at The Audacity, and his poetry in &Change. A full CV is available upon request through the email address provided.