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This presentation takes a new materialist approach to exploring the particularities of matter that entwine around the task of online theological education across regional contexts. Crucially, it appropriates Tara Page's new materialist pedagogy of placemaking for digitally networked theological education–in dialogue with writings on theological formation by Charles Foster, Willie James Jennings, and Katherine Turpin, Etienne Wenger's social theory of learning in practice, and indigenous insights on Land-based pedagogy from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer. It argues for the construction of curriculum with the differential practical mattering of learners in the online environment as its starting place, inviting students to pay increasing attention to their peculiarities of place and practices of placemaking.
This paper makes two main interventions. First, I will elaborate a new method for theological reflection rooted in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Marxist geography: what I am calling queer abolition geography. Second, to demonstrate the affordances of this geographical method of theological reflection, I will present a case study from my work as a spiritual care provider at a community hospital in San Francisco: hospital chaplaincy as queer abolition geography.
This query begins with Vine Deloria Jr.’s text, For This Land, delineating an indigenous sense of “belonging-to-the-land” quite different from colonial approaches presuming ownership and mere aesthetic appreciation. This difference involves not only generations of reflection provoked by a given topography of dwelling, carried forward in myth and ritual, but also sudden moments of “revelation” when a piece of the land by means of uncanny dread, communicates itself off-limits to humans, reserved-to-itself. Tracing such an earth-respecting “haunting” of landscape in relation to various cultures’ notions of “hungry ghosts” of community members untimely dispatched, re-visiting the living with disruption, Zimbabwean understanding of even clear-cut trees as capable of such ghosting, we will focus on Irish experiences of “hungry grass” arising from the 19th century Potato Famine and Oweynagat Cave’s 4,000-year-old Samhain tradition of ghostly “Halloween” appearances, alongside consideration of Jesus’ Mt. Hermon (verboten) encounter with haunting ancestry (Mark 9).
In the early 2000s, a number of Christian women participated in the tradition of Christian life writing through a newly accessible technology. Christian women bloggers, like Glennon Doyle, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melanie Shankle have been insufficiently considered by scholars and their own communities as Christian thought leaders. Drawn from my dissertation project examining twenty-first century women bloggers-turned-authors as theorists of the self, this paper interrogates these women’s shared investment in the craft of writing. Together, they imagine writing not as a practice of formation but as a practice of attention. They understand writing to be a technology of the self, but given their belief in a true, unchanging self, writing can only reveal, not transform. Drawing from other theorists of writing and my memoirists own reflection, I argue that writing is transformative and formative. Nevertheless, to acknowledge this would require my memoirists to accept a dynamic self.