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Disability scholarship has long grappled with the instability of the future. Feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer describes dominant cultural narratives of disability as structured by a temporal imaginary in which disability forecloses the possibility of flourishing unless medical intervention restores normative function. When cure is unavailable or ineffective, disabled futures are suspended within what Kafer calls “curative time,” a framework that renders the present merely a waiting period for medical resolution.
This paper engages disability studies, particularly the concept of “crip time,” alongside eschatology to challenge these impoverished temporal imaginaries. Crip time foregrounds unpredictability, contingency, and alternative rhythms of life. This paper argues that crip time offers theology crucial resources for inhabiting uncertain futurity. Read alongside apocalyptic theology, crip time interrupts assumptions of linear progress and invites forms of hope grounded not in control of the future but in presence, solidarity, and collective action.
Christian tradition has long wrestled with understanding the relation of time and eternity and its entanglement with questions of evil and suffering today. But where earlier spiritual thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius related questions of time and divine being to more logical conundrums of epistemology, it is with the late medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, where time, eternity, and evil are worked out in what this paper will argue is a comprehensive and realistic treatment of these enduring questions. It is in Julian’s differentiation between the “Now” of the divine perspective and the “now and not-yet” of human experience where questions of moral responsibility in both endurance of and resistance to evil can be helpfully engaged.
This paper rethinks the Christian virtue of hope in conversation with trauma studies, queer theory, and critical geography. In the first part of the paper, I argue that hope is a vexed subject for trauma studies and queer theory, because thinkers within these disciplines tend to conceptualize hope in terms of temporality and affectivity. But what if hope is neither an affective nor a temporal relation? What if it is, say, a practical and spatial one? To put the question in terms of Christian theology: What if the basic difference between the world as we know it and the eschaton is a spatial rather than a temporal difference? In the second half of this paper, I experiment constructively with this possibility, close-reading Romans 8:18-26 and Kathryn Tanner’s eschatology in *Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity* in conversation with critical geography’s conception of hope as a place-making activity.