The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister, religion columnist, public theologian, and motivational speaker. As an African-American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible.

One of Rev. Irene Monroe's outreach ministries to the public is the several queer religion columns she writes. Monroe writes “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper in the New England , “Faith Matters” for The Advocate magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. As a nationally renown African-American lesbian activist, scholar and public theologian her writings have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Bay State Banner, Cambridge Chronicle, and Metro News. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan's Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.

Monroe states that her "columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African-American, queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the "other" and it's usually acted upon 'in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Monroe graduated from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church in New Jersey before coming to Harvard Divinity School to do her doctorate.