About

Luis Menéndez-Antuña is Associate Professor of New Testament at Boston University School of Theology. His academic background includes a PhD from Vanderbilt University, as well as master's degrees from Vanderbilt University, Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, and Universidad Pontificia in Salamanca, and a BA from Universidad Deusto in Bilbao. His research interests encompass Biblical interpretation, Queer interpretation, Latinx interpretation, Slavery and Christianity, and liberation theology. He has previously served as Assistant Professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and was a Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. His scholarly work explores the queer and postcolonial afterlives of biblical texts, with a focus on liberatory readings of Revelation and other New Testament texts. He has published extensively in academic journals and is the author of the monograph 'Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation,' which employs postcolonial and queer historiographies to analyze Revelation 17-18. Currently, he is working on a second monograph titled 'New Testament Studies after the Cultural Studies Turn,' which examines theoretical and hermeneutical developments in the field. Menéndez-Antuña is a Fulbright scholar and has received multiple grants for his research. His work has been recognized with awards such as the Diamond Award for integrative scholarship from the Society of Biblical Literature in 2021. In addition to his academic pursuits, he brings twelve years of activism and ministry experience, including community organizing, HIV advocacy, work in homeless shelters, prisons, and street outreach with youth. His political and theological commitments are rooted in Catholic Christian Base Communities influenced by Latin-American Liberation Theology.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Religious studies
• Literature
• Psychology
• Art
• Psychoanalysis

Selected publications

• Why Do Biblical Interpreters Hate Sex So Much?

  2025-02-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, the author draws upon Queer Theory to explore some of the seemingly irreconcilable ways that sex is viewed by many traditional biblical scholars versus many secular Westerners. The author invites his reader, whom he assumes will most likely self-identify as “progressive” in matters of faith and sexuality, to consider that “despite what we tell ourselves about the salvific, nurturing, and healthy components of sex, we have also come to ‘hate sex,’ and there are good and bad reasons why we should continue hating it.”

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• The Colonies Strike Back

  Routledge eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Latin-American Liberation Theology (LTh), a religious movement with social, political, and artistic repercussions, geographically rooted in the Latin-American Subcontinent, had enormous impact worldwide at three levels: 1) the teaching and research agendas of theology as an academic discipline; 2) the dialogue with certain progressive humanisms and atheisms that had discarded theology as a conversation partner; and 3) the ethos of how Christian communities embodied their faith and their engagement with their political contexts. Despite its imperial past, Spain shared political circumstances with its Latin-American colonies in that both sides of the Atlantic experienced, over long periods in the twentieth century, right-wing military dictatorships. Although not exclusively, the rising of LTh in the 1960s and 70s was a reaction to the forged connection between fascism and the church, dictatorial politics, and authoritarian church. At a time when Spain was transitioning from a 40-year-long dictatorial regime into a modern democracy, the recently established link LTh had forged between left politics (communism and socialism) and sound Christian theology across multiple denominations allowed many communities in Spain to adopt a political and theological ethos that did not have to choose between Christianity and progressive politics. Consequently, this chapter explores how the import of LTh into Spain fostered newly-minted forces such as “Cristianos por el socialismo” (Christians for socialism), “Comunidades Eclesiales de Base” (CEB’s), and “Los Curas Obreros” (working-class priests).

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• The Book of Torture: The Gospel of Mark, Crucifixion, and Trauma

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Philosophy
  • Psychoanalysis

  Abstract Literary analysis of texts dealing with the experiences of tortured bodies faces numerous riddles. For example, the urge to be faithful to the victims’ experience hits a wall because of language’s inadequacy to express torment. Another riddle is the urgency to represent the tortured body outside the logic of torture embodied by the torturer. By incorporating some of Elaine Scarry’s insights in The Body in Pain (1988) and paying close attention to the testimonies of those who have survived torture, this article argues that the crucifixion of Jesus in Mark 15 is a case of torture that expands beyond the crucifixion itself and bleeds into other literary topics such as discipleship and the temple.

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• Of Social Death and Solitary Confinement: The Political Life of a Gerasene (Luke 8:26–39)

  Journal of Biblical Literature · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Characterization studies have recently experienced a revival through incorporation of interdisciplinary and processual analyses borrowed, in turn, from the broader field of literary studies. Studies on the Gospel of Luke exemplify a trend that, despite its increasing complexification of readerly strategies, continues to erase the role of real readers and contemporary communities of interpretation in the process of meaning making. In the present study, I offer an alternative to this deficit by analyzing, in intercontextual fashion, both the character of the Gerasene in Luke 8:26–39 and the experiences of prisoners in solitary confinement in the current US supermax prison system. I argue that the notion of social death shows that, in the Gerasene's and the prisoners' cases alike, relationality is the <i>conditio sine qua non</i> of subjectivity, and intersubjectivity is the condition of possibility of the political. The Gerasene, I conclude, transitions from an apolitical to a political status the moment another political animal (Jesus) steps into his domain.

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• Thinking Sex with the Great Whore

  2018-04-17 · 13 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Many scholars in Biblical and Revelation studies have written at length about the imperial and patriarchal implications of the figure of the Whore of Babylon. However, much of the focus has been on the links to the Roman Empire and ancient attitudes towards gender. This book adds another layer to the conversation around this evocative figure by pursuing an ideological critique of the Great Whore that takes into account contemporary understandings of sexuality, and in so doing advances a de-moralization of apparent sexual deviancy both in the present and in the past. Offering an emancipatory reading of Revelation 17-18 using Foucauldian, postcolonial and queer historiographies, this study sets out alternative paths for identity construction in Biblical texts. By using these alternative critical lenses, the author argues that the common neglect of the ethical and political impact of Biblical texts in the present can be overcome. This, in turn, allows for fresh reflection on the study of the Bible and its implications for progressive politics. Situated at the intersection of Revelation Studies, Biblical Studies and Hermeneutics, as well as Contextual/Liberationist Theologies and Queer and Postcolonial Criticism, this is a cutting edge study that will be of keen interest to scholars of Theology and Religious Studies.

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• Is Caravaggio a queer theologian? Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus

  Critical Research on Religion · 2018-06-05 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Queer theology has not paid enough attention to queer sex, how queers understand sexual intimate relationships outside hetero/homonormative frameworks, and more importantly, what notions of relationality with Otherness undergird those experiences and practices. This contribution exemplifies a trajectory of visualization—a theoretically based approach to reading art—where the practices of barebacking and cruising in queer subcultures trigger a reading of Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way the Damascus that, in turn, reads the biblical text (Acts 9) in terms of radical hospitality to Otherness. Barebacking and cruising as sexual practices documented in queer subcultures offer a framework to understand Caravaggio’s artwork as a theological source and as an interpretation of the biblical text.

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• Thinking sex with the whore in the present

  2018-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Conclusion

  2018-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Thinking apocalyptic resistance in the age of empire

  2018-04-17

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• Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation

  2018-04-11 · 4 citations

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Awards & honors

• Diamond Award for integrative scholarship (SBL, 2021)