Dag Øistein Endsjø

Dag Øistein Endsjø (born 11 November 1968 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is a Norwegian professor in religious studies at the University of Bergen, Norway,^[1][2] and a domestic Norwegian human rights advocate.^[3]

Career

Endsjø is primarily known for his research on Greek and Christian beliefs about resurrection and physical immortality, foremost in his book Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity (2009), in which he demonstrated how Christian resurrection beliefs also connects to ancient Greek beliefs in resurrection and physical immortality.^[4]

Of his other books, Sex and Religion: Teachings and Taboos in the History of World Faiths has been published in ten languages: Bulgarian,^[5] Chinese,^[6] English, Italian,^[7] Macedonian,^[8] Norwegian,^[9] Polish,^[10] Portuguese,^[11] Serbian,^[12] and Swedish.^[13]

Endsjø has also published on the subjects religion and human rights,^[14] religion and popular culture,^[15] and the cultural understanding of space.^[16] He writes on a variety of political and popularized subjects in Norwegian media.

Activism

As a domestic human rights advocate, Endsjø has contributed to change the Norwegian debate on equal rights into a general discussion of human rights,^[17] not least through being the leader of Menneskerettsalliansen, a Norwegian alliance of NGOs promoting equality on the fields of gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression, from 2004 to 2013.^[18] In 2003 he won a case against Norway in the EFTA Court, which then put a stop to the official Norwegian practice of excluding one gender from applying a number of university positions, ruling the practice as gender discriminatory.^[19] In 2013 Endsjø initiated the critique against the Norwegian government reaction to the prosecution of Marte Dalelv in Dubai, pointing out the initial lack of official Norwegian reaction against a human rights violation against a Norwegian citizen, a case which ended in an official turnaround by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.^[20]

Books

• Sex and Religion: Teachings and Taboos in the History of World Faiths. Reaktion Books 2011. ISBN 978-1-86189-815-9. This book is also published in Bulgarian, Chinese, Italian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Swedish.
• Det folk vil ha. Religion og populærkultur (What People Want. Religion and Popular Culture) (written together with Liv Ingeborg Lied). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 2011. ISBN 978-82-15-01748-8
• Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
• Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies. New York: Peter Lang 2008.
• Naturlig sex. Seksualitet og kjønn i den kristne antikken (co-editor with Halvor Moxnes and Jostein Børtnes). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk 2002.
• Lei av kjønn? Nær-kjønn-opplevelser og andre beretninger fra virkeligheten (co-editor with Helge Svare). Oslo: Cappelen Akademisk Forlag 2001.

Other publications (selection)

• “Immortal bodies, Before Christ. Bodily continuity in ancient Greece and 1 Corinthians”. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, vol. 30, 2008: 417-36.
• “The queer periphery. Sexual deviancy and the cultural understanding of space” i Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 54, 2008: 9-20.
• “Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights and the religious relativism of human rights”. Human Rights Review, vol. 6:2, 2005: 102-10.
• “To control death. Sacrifice and space in classical Greece”. Religion, vol. 33/4, 2003: 323-340.
• “To lock up Eleusis. A question of liminal space”. Numen, vol. 47, 2000: 351-86.
• “Placing the Unplaceable. The Making of Apollonius’s Argonautic Geography”. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol 38. 1997: 373-85.

References