Research

We need responsible, intelligent theology in today’s world. Even (or perhaps especially) when theology cannot be recognized as such, the world continues to draw on theological ways of knowing. When this occurs with ignorance or without care, the effects can be dangerous. Moreover, when the efficaciousness and importance of contextualized theological knowledge is ignored, political, historical, and sociological understandings falter. God transforms the world. God’s love empowers struggles for life and love; God reveals the eschatological presence and promise of liberation. As a theologian, my work is to witness and make this activity visible. I strive to do so especially where God’s liberating love is not being adequately recognized or put into words. Thus, my research moves into intellectual, social, and political spaces that may seem foreign to theology.

My research seeks contextualized answers to the question of how theology can be written effectively in today’s world, especially where theology and theological languages appear alien or strange. In this pursuit, I follow in the rich heritage of Tillichian-inflected theologies that integrate the scholastic materials of academic theology with the fleshy materials of life and experience. I seek to access the depth of theological traditions to respond meaningfully to the questions of today.

By drawing studies that move across disciplines and through history into my theological research, I gain insight into old and new strategies of theological knowledge. I incorporate political and economic theory, as I ruminate on ethnographic and sociological studies of human life. Critical theory and critical pedagogy inform the methods of interpretation and writing. My expertise centers in twentieth century theology and philosophy, but always in conversation with its formative historical traditions. Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous accompany my research, for instance, but so too do Anselm of Canterbury and Marguerite Porete. Throughout, my scholarship opens space to extend theological conversations to the complex ideas and puzzles that we need in order to teach and learn the lessons of God’s love today.

Research Areas

The questions of knowledge, power, and life that concern my theology move through the history of human inquiry with little respect for disciplinary boundaries. Accordingly, my research spans a variety of fields and topics, and the resulting scholarship contributes to a range of academic conversations including, but not limited to, postmodern, liberationist, feminist, and queer theologies.

The goal is to create resources and methods by which academic theology itself can encourage and strengthen liberative communities and their actions throughout society. Some of the fields and topics that my research spans include:

Constructive Theologies; Liberation Theologies; Feminisms; Queer Theologies and Theories; Sexuality and Religion; Postmodern Philosophies; Critical Theory; Literary Theory; Geography and Geopolitics; Radical and Liberationist Politics and Political Theories; Alternative Politics; Social Justice; and Theology and Economics

I am also interested in both the contributions and the dangers of technology - for scholarship, the written word, pedagogy, and society at large. As a side project, I pay attention to developments in the Digital Humanities.

Indecent Theological Writing

Implicate and Transgress: Marcella Althaus-Reid, Writing, and a Transformation of Theological Knowledge (Dissertation, Harvard 2015)

Marcella Althaus-Reid sought places where language or meaning might shift or exceed their possibilities. To do so, she pushed theology out of the light and into the dark shadows of global struggles for life, meaning, and (most importantly) love. In spaces of political, economic, and sexual struggle, Althaus-Reid proposed that we encounter the transformative embraces of God’s indecent love. The intimacies of bodies matter in the illicit encounters of dark alleys. Caresses of flesh undress illusions; desires imagine alternatives; and bodies hunger for the unthinkable. Put differently: love and desire disregard boundaries, including the boundaries of knowledge, law, economy, and self. To write of God’s love and our love—to write of God, humanity, and the world—we must recognize, refute, and resist the ideological dependencies in dominant modes of doing and communicating theology, because these dependencies constrain the possibilities of bodies in love. We must interrupt academic complacency with (what she called) “Totalitarian” theological languages. We must transform the doing of theology itself.

Althaus-Reid’s life history is complex, and her intellectual history more so. The dissertation provides a broad overview of Althaus-Reid's intellectual formation in relation to her theological arguments. In conversation with Elizabeth Stuart, Robert Goss, Mark Jordan, Lisa Isherwood, and others, Althaus-Reid worked to open space for a liberative theology that takes sexuality—as well as economics, geopolitics, and gender—seriously. The resulting theology created waves in the theological academy and established her with academic celebrity (or infamy, depending on perspective). Since her untimely death in 2009, Althaus-Reid’s influence continues to increase.

The text takes shape in five chapters comprising three parts, which emphasize Althaus-Reid’s engagement with liberation theologies, feminism, and queer theory, respectively. Each chapter-length study considers one of her provocations in conversation with her interlocutors, with careful attention paid to both its analytic substance and textual performance. The material richness of these analyses provides the basis to make a constructive contribution about the possibilities and demands of theological writing. I extend Althaus-Reid’s creativity to suggest that when we recognize and refuse ideological dependencies in standard modes of theological writing, we can push toward alternative ways of writing that, at their most successful, will stretch and multiply the theological languages in which we can come to know God’s love.

Study one engages with Paul Ricoeur, Jorge Luis Borges, and Umberto Eco to imagine writing in the shape of a hermeneutical labyrinth. The second questions the temporality of theological writing in conversation with Gustavo Gutiérrez, José María Arguedas, and Michel Foucault. The third examines how Althaus-Reid holds Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of obscenity together with Jean Baudrillard’s idea of reversibility, in order to press against illusions of writing that veil the materiality of lives lived in written pages. The fourth pursues the possibilities of writing bodies with Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, and Lisa Isherwood. The fifth study extends Althaus-Reid’s reading of Pierre Klossowski’s meditation on radical hospitality as imperative for kenotic theological writing. Taken together, the studies provide an ordered view on Althaus-Reid’s complex engagement with liberationist, feminist, and queer theoretical and theological traditions in the context of her ongoing dialogue with continental philosophy. Individually, the studies expand our imagination of what theological writing can or ought to be.

This work is the first book length treatment of Althaus-Reid’s theology. It clarifies her indecency by explaining key elements in its discursive context. As such, it is of pedagogical use to new students of transformative theologies, feminism, and queer theory, as well as advanced readers who seek a more nuanced understanding of Althaus-Reid’s writing. Simultaneously, the thesis opens new discursive spaces in the context of theological writing to contemplate Trinitarian questions of God, Jesus, and Spirit. It will interest lay, ministerial, and academic theologians who seek to know and communicate God’s loving presence in today’s world.

Rethinking Radical Resistence

Theology, like manna in the desert, must be renewed daily. It will not store and does not keep: each day, we must gather the words of God’s transformative presence in the world anew with respect to each day’s world. Accordingly, I study a range of political languages that share the immediacy of untangling the complex enactments of power of late capitalism and contemporary geo-politics.

This project centers on a comparison of two leftist approaches to articulating a resistant relation with oppressive power, which I put into conversation with kataphatic and apophatic traditions of theological speech. The project begins with the claim that we need new languages of resistance to address the suffering caused by contemporary manifestations of global power. While some modes of political resistance seek to confront power directly in order to contradict its basis and effects, others turn away through prefigurative practices that refuse the legitimacy of that power’s very existence. The former, for example, can be seen in certain forms of contemporary Marxist strategies, while the latter more commonly appears within a range of anarchist practices. I work to trouble the narrative of opposition for this difference by putting it in conversation with the traditions of kataphatic and apophatic language for God. In doing so, I hope to raise the possibility of alternative discursive possibilities for contemporary political theology.

The project puts the positive strategies in conversation with kataphatic theological speech and negative ones with apophatic speech in order to evidence the ways in which both strategies belong to an interrelated discursive historical matrix. Each approach can accomplish certain things, but always (and only) with recourse to the other; they build and depend on each other. By articulating contemporary orientations to power and the types of resistance they engender in relation to forms of speech about God, I seek to multiply the languages of resistance by relativizing the structures of worldly power vis-à-vis the surprising instantiations of God’s creative love.

Papers

For a list of conference and colloquium papers, please refer to the CV.

"Desirous Transformations: Writing Theologically/Theological Writing with Paul Tillich" (North American Paul Tillich Society, November 2015)

"Oxymoron or Imperative?: Academic Theology and the Anarchic Praxis of Refusing Power" (Anarchist Studies Network International Conference, Loughborough University, September 2014)

"Revolutionary Praxis" (Colloquium Paper, John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics, January 2013)

"Occupy Occupy Religions: A Theology of the Multitude" [at 59:15] (Book Session, American Academy of Religion, November 2012)

Teaching

Philosophy

Students achieve knowledge; a teacher does not provide it. I hold this saying close as a reminder that my role—the role of a teacher—is first and foremost to cultivate a robust learning environment that enables the formation of a productively collaborative community of peer learner-teachers. Questions pertaining to just lives well-lived center the subject material, and the ideas that come in response incur the richness of meaning that those who study are willing to invest. Knowledge of this sort cannot be given; it must be achieved. Thus, my teaching style appears as one primarily of expert facilitation. Echoing Paolo Freire, I want to be able to say: “Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world.”

To participate meaningfully and responsibly in theological discourse entails responsibility to both the traditions of theological teaching that have shaped and are shaped by our religious communities and to the world in which we live. Beyond providing information, theological education should foster the qualities of religious responsibility that will allow students to position themselves, their theological ideas and practices, and their vocational labor justly, now and into the future. The reason for this is straightforward: theology, properly understood, is powerful and dangerous. As James Cone taught (and continues to teach) me: “Theology can never be neutral. It affects the world. People live and die because of theology. It is dangerous.”

At introductory and advanced levels, I help students confront the shaping influence of theology on the world in which we live—and on the worlds that we desire. I ask at regular intervals: Can students formulate, analyze, and critically reflect on their own arguments, experience, and convictions, as well as they do others? Do students articulate the assumptions and implications of the ideas under consideration? Do students meet foreign or new ideas with an intellectual spirit of generosity? Are they integrating the course materials with their broader questions and vocational goals? I want to be able to confidently answer yes. Active learning strategies that require critical analysis and personal involvement offer pedagogical tools to achieve these goals. Sometimes it is the unexpectedness or foreignness of an activity that allows a student to see the implications of an idea and to start making connections.

Courses & Syllabi

Courses

Sample Syllabi