You must be this tall to ontologize @just-like-barth - Tumblr Blog

Well I’m sad to hear it but, having been at that juncture before, I fully understand. May whatever path you go on be a blessing. Hasten the revolution.

Thank you 💖 it honestly has felt so freeing, like being able to recognize just how much energy I spent ignoring that certain things just made me feel like shit on a personal level and not having to expend that energy anymore

So wait you aren’t a Christian anymore?

I’m currently still a confirmed Episcopalian, however I have realized over the past few weeks that I do not have any desire to remain within the bounds of Christianity and I’ll need to find personal religious/spiritual community elsewhere, a realization that I had been putting off for somewhere between months and years

Have a call with my advisor in a little over an hour to talk about what exactly it would mean and look like to be studying/working in a very confessional Christian discipline while, uh, no longer being Christian lmao

I think that I have the spark of a thought process that will grow to be the final paper for my Tillich seminar, and I’m like really stoked about it

It’s possible, although I don’t know how likely/unlikely it will turn out to be, that I’m going to exit this semester firmly preferring Barth to Tillich because Barth’s complete rejection of any incursion of the world into theology might turn out to be easier to work under/in conversation with than the many qualifications that Tillich places on his “correlative system” between the material and Divine spheres.

#the massive thing that tillich has going for him right now is his far superior understanding of interpretation and mediation #barth seems to assert sometimes that we can reach the True Meaning of the text if we read it in the right spirit #and tillich's relation to ecclesiastical history and history of doctrine and of interpretation is better #but yeah

My engagement with Tillich continues to be split between excitement about the models he proposes, because they explicitly allow the Church (understood broadly) to be placed under the prophetic judgement of a theology which does not cease to be a theology simply because it is turned against the Church, and extreme frustration with the fact that he retains a form of Christian supremacy and exceptionalism and thus justifies the very acts of colonization and christianization that should be the focus of a theological prophetic judgement against the Church

As is the case with many authors, I am constantly amazed at Tillich's ability in what I've read so far to compile a beautiful set of analytic premises and tools and then completely fail to use them adequately

just-like-barth

In other news, seeing people on here talk about psychoanalysis as if it were a universal theory of existence and make fun of it for being obviously wrong as that increasingly annoys me because every prof talking about psychoanalysis i’ve had has foregrounded “this is specifically the analysis of the cartesian subject (or the subject who is constituted along the model of cartesian subjectivity), and as such is temporally and epistemologically/culturally specific, it does not work outside of this.”

just-like-barth

“Freud was shit at establishing a general rule of humanity but he was actually accidentally incredible at creating a sociology of europeans at a certain time period” it might shock you to know that psychoanalysis actually intended to do the thing you’re saying it does well and does not pretend or try to do the thing you regard it as failing for not having done

In other news, seeing people on here talk about psychoanalysis as if it were a universal theory of existence and make fun of it for being obviously wrong as that increasingly annoys me because every prof talking about psychoanalysis i’ve had has foregrounded “this is specifically the analysis of the cartesian subject (or the subject who is constituted along the model of cartesian subjectivity), and as such is temporally and epistemologically/culturally specific, it does not work outside of this.”

One of my courses this semester is a seminar on Paul Tillich, and I’ve honestly been looking forward to it because of what I know about him (a socialist of some variety, an avowed non-literalist, straddling the line between theology and philosophy, etc.) and tbh this first book (The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message) has given me pause a little bit. It’s the transcription of a lecture given at the Pacific School of Religion in 1963, and it leaves untroubled a lot of assumptions that I suppose I thought he would have challenged.

Granted there were doubtless various pressures surrounding the lecture that led to a more apologetic tone than i would have expected (and I have to remind myself that it was the 60s and much movement has occurred in theological sensibilities, even radical ones, across the intervening 60 years), but even still I was surprised about the extent to which he didn’t feel the need to defend his assumptions around “the Christian message” and his frankly xenophobic (despite seeming at times to be trying to praise the “Eastern” philosophies and religions he invokes for various things) characterizations of non-Christian culture. I wasn’t expecting him to be perfect, obviously, but for all his reputation as a critical theologian, this book was a little surprising.

So Tillich is p cool so far lol

(Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch, 1966)

I really really wanna expand my thesis chapter about Marcella and transness but I am first of all nervous about writing anything abt her without first talking through it with a prof who actually knows the field of queer theology intimately (nobody at my masters institution knew anything abt it tbh) and I'm second of all realizing that if i expand it I'm going to have to include the fact that when she uses "bisexual" she means "intersex" (or, more accurately, an imaginary perfect hermaphrodism) and that turns the project from being an article to being basically half a book bc her entire second book and large portions of her first are devoted to the topic of "bisexuality" lmao

At the beginning of her article “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Lugones draws strict parameters around gender and its theoretical comprehensibility. Insisting, with Scott, on a rigorous historicization of gender, she rejects the simplistic construction of an ahistorical “patriarchy,” arguing instead that “heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other.”[20] It is crucial, in her understanding, to identify gender not merely as modern but also as specifically colonial. In this, she is joined by Oyèwùmí, whose work with the Yorùbá culture led her to an understanding that the category woman “simply did not exist in Yorùbaland prior to its sustained contact with the West.”[21] The coloniality of gender was evidenced not merely by the imposition of gender categories on a people who had previously had no such construct but also by the continued assumption by researchers that the regime of gender (and the system of sexual difference which it produces as its foundation[22]) was so unquestionably universal that it necessarily always existed in Yorùbáland.[23] Gender must be historicized, then, not merely because it would be inaccurate to treat it as an ahistorical constant, but because its purported self-evident ahistoricity is a function of its coloniality.

Jane Nichols and Rachel Stuart, “Transgender: A Useful Category of Biblical Analysis?” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 1, no. 2 (2020): 5.

A transgender hermeneutic that resists both anachronism and the projection of colonial categories as the price of its affinity with its objects must first forsake gender and strive to understand gendered categories, as far as possible, on their own terms and without presupposing an irreducible man/woman (or male/female) divide as their most (and, ultimately, only real) central divide. Its aim should not be to identify figures or narratives that are transgender according to our modern understanding of gender and transgender identity, but rather to highlight those that struggled against and navigated the gendered categories of their day in ways reminiscent of the ways that transgender people today struggle against and navigate gender. The goal of this hermeneutic is not to project transgender identity onto the text or upon biblical/historical figures, but instead to place transgender people in a long and storied tradition of category rebels and boundary crossers.

Jane Nichols and Rachel Stuart, “Transgender: A Useful Category of Biblical Analysis?” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 1, no. 2 (2020): 11.

God I love Tanner's occasional bluntness, like she writes so beautifully and uses long sentences so effectively and then every now and then ends one of them with such a human note that it's just sjshdjjsshshdshbssns

Glorifying God by denying glory to creatures, by insisting that there is nothing of value to them in which they might glory, is a bad strategy.

Tanner, Christ the Key, 79.

Shoutout to Kathryn Tanner for being the only theologian whom I have read to use the word "shit" in a serious volume, multiple times in one sentence I might add

Ok so Ian McFarland has been added to the list of theologians whose verbal pictures have almost brought me to tears in a public place

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

You must be this tall to ontologize