Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng

The Rev. Dr. Patrick S. Cheng is an Episcopal priest, attorney, and theologian.  He serves as the theologian in residence at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and as an adjunct professor of Anglican studies at Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.  He also works for a national agency of the Episcopal Church.

Cheng is the author of Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (2011), which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.  He is also the author of From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ (2012) and Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality, and Spirit (2013).  Cheng has contributed to a number of other works on the intersections of theology and sexuality, including The Queer Bible Commentary (2006), Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, Second Edition (2010), and The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality, and Gender (2014).

Prior to 2015, Cheng served as a tenured associate professor of historical and systematic theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He also served as the chair and a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Committee on the Status of LGBTIQ Persons in the Profession.

Born in Hong Kong, Cheng was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He attended Yale College, where he received his B.A. summa cum laude in English Language and Literature (1990) and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.   He then attended Harvard Law School, where he received his J.D. magna cum laude (1993) and was an executive editor of the Harvard Law Review.  After clerking for a federal appellate judge and practicing tax and employee benefits law at two New York City law firms, Cheng received his M.A. (2000), M.Phil. (2009), and Ph.D. (2010) from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York under the direction of the late Dr. James H. Cone.

Baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, Cheng was received into the Episcopal Church in 1998.   He was ordained an Episcopal deacon in the Diocese of Massachusetts in 2014 by the late Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2015 by the Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates.   Prior to his ordination in the Episcopal Church, Cheng served as an ordained minister in the Metropolitan Community Churches.  He is married to Michael J. Boothroyd.

For more information about Cheng, please see his website and his Twitter feed. His list of publications can be found on Google Scholar and his online lectures are on YouTube.

(This biographical statement provided by Patrick Cheng.)

Biography Date: March, 2010; rev. July 2021

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