Now open access: Theopoetics and Religious Difference (2020) (what is contemporary?)
My first book, Theopoetics and Religious Difference, recently became open access thanks to a grant from my institution. So a big thank you to the Amsterdam Mennonite Seminary for making this work more easily available. In the book, I note that interreligious relations and the interpretation (and construction) of the religious “other” is often more complicated and “unruly” than theology typically seems comfortable with. Many approaches to interreligious relations (including liberal and pluraist approaches) seem to repress or deny that difficulty, instead of seeing it as the site (or non-site) where, for all its ambiguity, newness nevertheless emerges. In order to find a mode of theological thinking and imagining that can embrace such unruliness, I turn to “theopoetics”. In particular, I investigate three authors: Richard Kearney, John D. Caputo, and Catherine Keller. While their thinking diverges from each other, they each seek to do theology in a way that embraces possibility, uncertainty, and creativity.
Not in the bright lights of pluralist commonality but in the gentle growth encouraging us to piece together what was broken, to restore, to nurture what is as yet but a seed of togetherness: a vision of relation and community incessantly arising from the depths of our difference.
Guided by these readings, a theopoetics may thus recognize in the dislocating intransparency the paradoxical conditions for a new beginning, for an emerging togetherness. As we put together the shards of our brokenness, in the interaction something divine may happen. As difference calls into question the proud confidence of religion, it also opens us up to our interdependency. This is what a theopoetics of religious difference would ultimately seek to not only name but evoke,make real, weep and pray for: The newness in the brokenness, the relation arising from the depths of difference, a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. (p. 247)
Looking back at this book now, it strikes me how it feels oddly contemporary for the few years in which it was written. In the years I worked on it, a profound shift in the dominant political imagination in my context took place. I started work in 2014, when liberal inclusivity seemed unassailable; six years later, when the book finally saw publication, political realities had taken a significantly more grim turn. Over the course of the book, you can almost trace this shift, as deconstructive playfulness gives way to a more relational and serious tone toward the end. If I were to write a sixth chapter now, it would inevitably take a more somber and resolute tone still, asking what this unruliness might mean in an era of crisis, catastrophe, and collapse.
Last year, I was invited to reflect on this shift in the contemporary mood of theology as part of a fascinating survey undertaken by the Czech journal Salve. The survey is free to read, and I recommend you read the whole thing if you can. It includes contributions by people like Martin Koci and Dörte Mohme.
I’ll reproduce my own thoughts here in English:
The contemporary is the imminent
The contemporary is constituted by what is imminently expected. The way a culture, discipline, or individual experiences a “now” is indelibly tied to the events it sees hurtling toward itself. In that light, postmodern playfulness and fascination with the marginal is dampened by impending crisis and catastrophe (a “polycrisis” of climate collapse, political authoritarianism, war, and so on).
Postcolonial theorist and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) describes this for his own field: postcolonial historians are trained in deconstructing modern universalisms (History, Science, the Human, and so on). But facing the climate crisis, they must learn again to see the whole; not just to deconstruct, but to trace the interrelation of crises and the planetary scale (and scientific reality) of what faces us.
I think this is also accurate for theology, at least for those theologies we call postmodern, postliberal, postcolonial, theopoetic, and so on. Just as we have gotten somewhat good at embracing a deconstructive or particularist attitude, we must (at breakneck speed) learn again to love and tend to the indelible entanglement that ties us together, for better or worse.
So, for example Kwok Pui Lan in 2005 still argued for theological imagination to resist “imagining the whole” and instead to trace the marginal, but in 2021, she explicitly argues for a “global perspective” and a “planetary politics.” Similarly, in the 1990s, Catherine Keller had written against a (“quasi-apocalyptic”) finality in our thought and politics; in 2021 she revisits this skepticism, as we do truly seem to “face apocalypse.”
Such a turn toward tending the whole comes with tragic timing, of course: It is a “whole” that, if it was ever there, is facing imminent fracture and collapse. The effects of the polycrisis will be very differently felt by different groups of creatures, and Christian theological language is already almost speechless, or at least unintelligible, in many parts of Europe and indeed the world. So, it seems to me, if theology is to be able to speak to the contemporary, it will need to be (as Heather Walton puts it in 2020) a “theopoetic in ruins”: an articulation amid loss and silence, speaking where nothing can be said, tracing a loss that already, catastrophically, announces itself.
