Elizabeth “Liz” Edman (she/her), Episcopal priest and queer theologian, was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1962. Her mother was a native Arkansan whose family goes back at least eight generations in the state. Her father grew up near Chicago, the son of V. Raymond Edman, president of Wheaton College and a prominent evangelical author and academic. Liz was born into the Episcopal Church. Her mother was a singer and particularly loved sacred music. Liz recalls that her mother carried a deep sense of the sacred in her life, and could feel and give voice to it in her music. Her mother’s people in Arkansas were journalists, ministers, and educators. Thus, Liz inherited from both sides of her family a legacy of telling the truth as you saw it, even if it did not make you popular. In a near coming-of-age cliché, Liz experienced falling in love with a close friend in high school (with whom she is still in touch today). Having inherited the beautiful tradition of truth-telling, it was natural for her to recognize her own sexuality at an early age. Thankfully, her family was supportive of her truth as well.
Sadly, Liz’s mother passed away when Liz was only 15 years old. After her mother’s death, Liz and her brother moved to Pennsylvania where their father was already living. This put her within spitting distance of New York City where she had always wanted to be. She attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, majoring in political theory. At F&M, she had an extraordinary experience meeting the college chaplain, Barb Brummett. Barb was the 40th woman ordained by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States. She had an incredible influence on Liz. Barb was a great source of pastoral support but was also a “kickass” preacher and powerful woman. Liz had planned to become a lawyer, but when she met Barb the faith that she inherited from both sides of her family ignited within her. The call to serve via the law translated into a call to serve via the church.
In 1985, Liz graduated from F&M, moved to New York City, and started a job in the political world. She fell away from the Episcopal Church because, having experienced four years of inclusive language chapel services, she did not think she could have a relationship with the Book of Common Prayer. In New York, she worked as a political organizer for a labor union, DC 37, and honed her gifts for political strategy. But the call to ministry was still very real. She craved the rigor and excitement that she learned from Barb Brummett in college. She matriculated at Union Theological Seminary in 1988, entering during one of Union’s golden ages.
At Union, Liz studied with renowned Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, who became her mentor and remains a dear friend. James Cone also had a profound influence on Liz’s theological growth and advised her Master’s thesis. By the mid-80’s, Union was already committed to inclusive and expansive language in their liturgical and academic work and had a robust Lesbian and Gay Caucus. So, when Liz entered the institution in 1988, there was already a space carved out to bring her full self to bear. She entered a milieu with some of the best minds in Christian thinking. Bringing her heart and mind into deep questioning was a challenging but profoundly formative experience. What she received at Union was more than affirmation and apologetics; Phyllis Trible taught her to bring her hardest questions to the Bible, assuring her, “The text will sustain it.”
Liz did her field education with Momentum, a faith-based organization that served hot meals to people with HIV/AIDS during the height of that pandemic. She started doing HIV/AIDS work because she thought that she’d be working with gay men, but instead she encountered mostly people who had contracted the virus through IV drug use, as well as their partners and children. Momentum hired a team of seminarians as chaplains to talk with clients as they ate their meals. These conversations turned into opportunities for deep reflection on what people with HIV/AIDS were experiencing. At Momentum, Liz had the closest thing to a conversion experience in her life. During a Bible study for women with HIV/AIDS, the women shared that during the hardest moments of their lives they felt a force that had carried them through, and they named that force as God. As Liz struggled to reconcile her childhood faith with her academic work at Union, that group of resilient women made faith in God real and alive for her.
Upon graduating, Liz was hired by Jersey City Medical Center as a lay chaplain to their HIV/AIDS unit. JCMC asked Liz to provide spiritual support to patients both pediatric and adults, many of whom had been burned by whatever religious affiliation they’d ever had. She worked at the hospital in the days before the drug cocktails that made HIV/AIDS largely a manageable chronic illness. Much of the work involved death and dying and the impact of a brutal disease on her patient’s fragile bodies.
Liz’s experience at the hospital had a profound impact on her faith. Her patients asked hard questions, complicated by increasingly common queerphobic and racist religious assertions that HIV/AIDS was a punishment from God. With her patients she worked to create a coherent theological perspective that spoke to their actual lives, and bring it to bear at bedsides and funerals. In that line of work, Liz discerned a crystal-clear call to priesthood. One standout moment was when she was helping a woman who had recently given birth to an HIV+ daughter. The patient asked Liz to baptize the child because she was terrified that her daughter could die at any time and would go to hell. Liz ached to be there with them in that moment, but as a layperson, short of a health emergency she could not fulfill this woman’s request. Liz referred her to the Catholic chaplain instead. However, that experience awakened a deep sense of a call to sacramental ministry.
Pursuing that call, Liz started the ordination process in her parish, St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in the theater district in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. Kathleen Mandeville was the rector at the time and was an out lesbian. As a theater community, St. Clement's was already populated with queer folks and artistic types. The liturgy was robust, gorgeous, alive, and intrepid. That’s where she learned that she could actually have a relationship with the Book of Common Prayer. New York’s bishop, Paul Moore, freed the congregants up to create a translation of the Nicene Creed using expansive and anti-oppressive language. All of a sudden, Liz was able experience the faith of her childhood but in a beautiful and inclusive way. When saying the Nicene Creed, she actually believed everything that came out of her mouth! She started preaching at St. Clement's, with Kathleen as a great mentor, and continued the ordination process.
In 1995, Liz was laid off from the hospital, one of countless casualties during mass layoffs throughout the healthcare system. Returning to her political career, she landed an extraordinary position directing government affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was incredible for her to be among so many gifted individuals, many at the pinnacle of their careers, and to be amidst so much beauty after the sensory hell of an inner-city hospital.
Still smarting from the homophobic religious rhetoric she had dealt with in the hospital, Liz and her then-partner felt a deep call to establish a covenant with each other, in their church, and importantly, to call it a marriage. Though marriage equality was barely a glimmer in the eyes of LGBTQ activists, Liz and her partner wanted to call it a marriage because that was what they were doing. They did not want to use a euphemism. Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, the wedding became complicated and controversial. With the tacit approval of their bishop, the wedding was held at St. Clement’s on May 7, 1995. The controversy continued to ripple, and a year later the Diocesan Commission on Ministry declined to put her forward. The net effect was that she was ejected from the ordination process and would have to start over, after investing two and a half years in the process.
It is significant to note that at exactly the same moment, across the river, Bishop Walter Righter of Newark was on ecclesiastical trial for having ordained an openly gay man. Given the deep turbulence facing the church at the time, diocesan leaders were perhaps understandably concerned about putting their bishop into a difficult position by elevating openly queer people for ordination, especially those who seemed comfortable courting controversy. Ironically, Liz’s work in HIV/AIDS did not make it easier for her to communicate her sense of call to members of the Commission. Liz had learned early on that she could not walk into someone’s hospital room spouting language about sin, salvation, and redemption and expect an honest conversation about what that person was enduring spiritually. She and her patients had begun using other words to describe the same spiritual experiences. She admits that she forgot to turn her Episopal translator back on when she met with Commission members, and they cited her apparent reluctance to “speak the language of the faith” as one of the reasons she was turned away.
In 2000, Liz and her partner moved to Vermont. There, she reentered the ordination process in Vermont under Tom Ely, then the Bishop of Vermont, and Ken Poppe, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Burlington. Still making a living via her political career, Liz landed a job with Kimbell Sherman Ellis, the lobbying firm that had helped pass Vermont’s civil union law. One of Liz’s early assignments was to organize a press conference featuring faith leaders who supported civil unions. After the event, she learned that reporters had approached a cluster of clergy members to ask where in the Bible they found support for their position on civil unions. The clergy struggled to answer the question, asking each other, “Love your neighbor as yourself?” and such. In that moment, Liz knew that helping clergy answer this question would be a vital part of her work as a priest.
Ordained to the priesthood at last in August 2006, Liz landed her dream job as the Episcopal Chaplain to Northwestern University, and her family moved to Evanston, Illinois. For two years Liz joyously stepped into the role she knew she’d always been called to. And then everything went sideways. Liz fell in love with a doctoral student and left her partner. She went to her bishop to confess the situation and receive his guidance. When she told her board, they fired her on the spot. In explaining their decision, her board chair told her that she had violated her marriage vows, “and,” he said, “you are still married!” The irony was not lost on her. She had been thrown out of the ordination process in 1996 for having a wedding and calling it a marriage. Little more than a decade later she was fired from her first job as a priest for “violating her marriage vows.” Although racked with guilt about the entire situation and taking responsibility for the pain she had caused, she pushed back on that point. Marriage equality did not yet exist. She and her former partner were not married in the eyes of Vermont, Illinois, or the Episcopal Church. Their civil union was not recognized by Illinois and could not be dissolved there. Though her priesthood was never at risk, it was the second time her vocation had been upended by a church still waffling with indecision about issues involving human sexuality. The situation illustrates how precarious queer people’s lives have been inside the church as the church has shifted its perspective on the lives and ministries of LGBTQ people.
Liz moved back to New York in 2010 and slowly put her life back together, thankful to be able to fall back on her political career to put food on the table for her kids and keep a roof over their heads. It was then that Liz began trying to organize some kind of movement that would take a new approach to LGBTQ religious teaching. The idea was born of a simple observation: Preaching had always been Liz’s strongest vocation, and like any good preacher, Liz often looked for a pithy anecdote to illustrate the main theological point in the sermon. With remarkable regularity, Liz observed that these anecdotes were drawn from her experience in LGBTQ community. She began wondering why this was the case, and in the wondering, she began to see a deep resonance between essential premises of queer ethics and essential tenets of Christian faith. She saw that this resonance created an opportunity to lift up LGBTQ experience as something that could inform Christian faith, rather than the typical posture of trying to defend LGBTQ identity in light of Christian teaching. Moreover, she saw that this could be an avenue to push back against queerphobic religious rhetoric: not simply naming queer and transphobia as wrong, but as antithetical to the teachings of both Jesus and Paul.
Liz started talking with people, hoping to build some kind of organizing structure for this new movement. She had meeting after meeting with people who were sympathetic to her idea, which she called “the queerness of faith.” But while these three-hour conversations were often invigorating, they were also exhausting. And she knew that no movement could be built on ideas that required such long and detailed explanation. She realized that she needed to write it down. These ideas became the infrastructure of her first book, Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press, 2016).
Liz drafted the introduction to the book and in early 2012 approached Michael Bronski, who was editing a series for Beacon Press called Queer Ideas/Queer Action. Three hours after she sent the email containing her freshly written proposal, Gayatri Patnaik, the executive editor, called saying that they wanted the book. Patnaik cited two reasons: first, the book’s thesis--that authentic Christianity is and must be queer--was a seismic shift away from the apologetics that still characterized most queer theology. Second, she said, “This book exudes joy,” a refreshing perspective for anything having to do with LGBTQ identity and religion.
The long bottled-up argument poured out of Liz onto the page. She submitted the first manuscript for Queer Virtue in November 2013. Michael and Gayatri went to work, turning Liz’s colloquial homiletic style--truly a strung together series of sermons--into a book.
When the manuscript was finally put to bed in 2015, Michael and Gayatri advised her to think about how to help people receive this new approach to queer theology. “You are asking people to think in a new way,” said Gayatri. “Your job is to make this easier for them.” Liz remembered that the people who found it easiest to understand the book were people who already knew her voice: i.e., people who had heard her preach. Securing a small grant from Oasis, an LGBTQ ministry based in her home diocese of Newark, New Jersey, Liz produced a series of short videos explaining each step of what she had begun calling “the path of Queer Virtue.”
Queer Virtue launched in May of 2016. It was possibly the first book published by a major publisher that flipped the lens, arguing that if someone is on trial according to basic Christian tenets, it is not queer people, but the church. Queer Virtue crystallized a shift that was taking place throughout the subconscious of the queer community. Though the book was never widely known, its premise quickly began to be absorbed into public parlance as many queer people came to recognize their spirituality and their sexuality as something beautiful, a sacred gift intentionally bestowed by God. Although aspects of the book were quickly dated, Liz saw this development as a sign of progress.
Liz has continued to look for way to explore “the queerness of faith.” In 2017, she partnered with Parity to create Glitter+Ash Wednesday, a project to increase the visibility of progressive, queer-positive Christians and to explore Christian liturgy through a queer lens.
In September 2021, she partnered with Trinity Church Wall Street and the NYC Anti-Violence Project to organizing a national webinar on spiritual violence against LGBTQ people. The forum was organized into two panels: one panel with queer and trans folks sharing experiences, defining spiritual violence, and discussing why spiritual violence hits queer and trans souls so hard. The second panel featured faith leaders talking about what faith communities should be doing to address the wounds of spiritual violence.
Currently, Liz is merging her expertise in political strategy and in scripture/theology to equip Christian communities witness to our faith more effectively in the public square. “The Stone Catchers” is a training designed to help churches combat anti-queer and trans laws and other community-eroding efforts stemming from White Christian Nationalism. Inspired by the NYC Anti-Violence Project’s Upstander Training, the Stone Catcher training was first envisioned by a multiracial group of queer and trans faith leaders in 2023. The training weaves together theological reflection and somatic experience to help participants see their faith through a fresh lens and develop an appreciation for the inherent scandal of Christianity. Lastly, another book is starting to take shape amid these current projects.
Liz is currently a member of St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in Brooklyn and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBTQ synagogue in New York City. Additionally, she counts herself profoundly blessed to experience life-giving community among the many, many faithful souls who draw on queer insights to breathe new life into sacred tradition.
(This biographical statement was written by Elizabeth Herrick from an interview with Liz Edman on August 19, 2024 and was edited by Liz Edman.)
Biography Date: March 2025
“Rev. Liz Edman | Profile”, LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, accessed April 25, 2025, https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/liz-edman.