Journalist, radio producer, professor and author Deborah Jian Lee will visit 91短视频 on Wednesday, Feb. 15.聽 The 10 a.m. chapel in Lehman Auditorium and a 4 p.m. colloquium, 鈥淔aith From the Margins,鈥� in the seminary’s Martin Chapel are open to the public. In addition she鈥檒l also participate in several events with students.
Lee鈥檚 work often takes her to the fringes of societies: whether of Chinese family structures or evangelical Christianity. Her first book, Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon Press, 2015) examines the counter-cultures of the American church.
Jian Lee is currently touring the U.S. speaking about Rescuing Jesus and the social issues it references.She’s also had a successful career as a freelance journalism. With colleague Sushma Subramanian, Lee produced an award-winning radio documentary about one of the 鈥渂achelor villages鈥� of China, where aging straight men face a life without a romantic partner due to the population鈥檚 gender imbalance. She has been published in The Atlantic, Forbes and Self, among others.
In childhood, she joined a Chinese immigrant church, seeking solidarity in the face of racially-motivated bullying at school. However, the church鈥檚 exclusion of the LGBTQ community prompted her to leave religion as a young adult.
As a journalist years later, Lee encountered a pro-LGBTQ faction of Christianity 鈥� an 鈥渦nderground鈥� queer group at the evangelical Biola University. 鈥淭hose queer and ally evangelical college kids embodied the very teachings of Jesus that compelled me to call myself a Christian back in my youth,鈥� says Jian Lee in an article for 鈥淏elieve Out Loud,鈥� an online Christian network that advocates for LGBT equality.
鈥淲hen you鈥檙e looking at the millenials, you鈥檙e definitely seeing this reinvention of what church is,鈥� she said in an episode of National Public Radio鈥檚 鈥淥n Point. 鈥淚 see the church changing radically, and I see churches who are able to invite and readily include and celebrate the diversity of humanity 鈥� those are the ones that are going to survive.鈥�
Learn more
Lee joins two other experts to speak about millenials in the church in an with Tom Ashbrook for “On Point.”
Read a of ‘Rescuing Jesus’ in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
In , Jian Lee discusses her book, intersectionality, purity culture and her own spiritual story.
If I am to believe what this young lady says, then I have to disbelieve much of what the bible says. I find the title Rescuing Jesus very offensive as if we need to rescue him. When I got saved, Jesus forgave me of my sins. I did not continue to live in them. Jesus rescued me and many others that I know from a life of sin. The true church will survive and lives will be changed because of it. And the true church will love all sinners including the LGBTQ community and call them to repentance. By not doing this, they are being denied the opportunity to receive salvation.
I agree wholeheartedly with Lane