October 1, 2015 / Perspective
Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus is a timely work for both Bonhoeffer studies and theological engagement in general.
The Perspective section offers reviews of selected publications and informed opinions on current events or issues.
Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus is a timely work for both Bonhoeffer studies and theological engagement in general.
Marilynne Robinson’s novels have become almost synonymous with loneliness, but solitude here remains entangled with a less acknowledged trope—an enveloping and dazzling darkness.
This essay draws on Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure to discuss the relationship between queerness and children.
The best – or perhaps only – way for theology to be itself is to fail.
According to Julian Forth, feminist queer negativity helps us rethink salvation in the martyrdom of Perpetua.
While Halberstam’s articulation of the concept of “queer forgetfulness” is rich and widely applicable, we may not want to be too quick to assume that forgetfulness can function as a normative concept. In respect to economically marginalized groups, such as African Americans in the United States, forgetting and forming the new kinds of queer kinship bonds Halberstam speaks about may simply be impossible. Within certain minority groups family bonds and the memory of the past may well be necessary for survival and act as the material through which creative transformation of the past emerges.
In this essay Brandy Daniels explores how a queer embrace of failure is generative for Christian virtue ethical frameworks; and argues that failure, through its critical skepticism of the notion of stable and normative paths towards clear ideals, provides a counter-framework for a theological anthropology that acknowledges and affirms creaturely existence and engenders a liberative ethics grounded in risk-taking and inclusion.
By reading the book of Jonah along with Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure this piece asks what questions a political theology written from the side and through the affects of failures might pose and face.
At critical moments in the history of Christianity, it is the outsiders, rather than people …