Public Discourses about Homosexuality and Religion in Europe and Beyond: An Introduction

This chapter introduces the composition of this volume, Public Discourses About Homosexuality and Religion in Europe and Beyond. It details how the volume contributes to the existing body of literature through its focus on public discourses and its balanced attention to different religious traditions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism). It also provides an outline of the volume, explaining why the Netherlands has been taken as a special case study—because of the country’s central position in Europe and its rather early tolerance of homosexuality, among other reasons—and showing how the rest of the volume explores past and present discourses on homosexuality and religion in Germany, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, France, Serbia, Russia, Zambia, and Indonesia.