In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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This paper will compare two theologies of human freedom in relation to artistic creativity: Nicolas Berdyaev’s theology of creativity, which contends that human agency is characterized by freedom such that humans extend, and even eclipse, God’s creative act through their creativity as a means to their own salvation; and Karl Barth’s theological anthropology, which emphasizes that human action should be understood in relation to the freedom of the triune God, who alone is truly free and yet who graciously upholds and enables creaturely activity through Jesus Christ. Although Barth never developed a theology of artistic creativity and had deep reservations about the arts, his construal of human freedom provides not only a needed corrective to theologies of creativity, like Berdyaev’s, that overemphasize human agency but can provide a firmer foundation for humanity’s artistic activity: the freedom and grace of the triune God. 

I consider the role of Mary in Barth’s theology as Mary’s acceptance of the virgin birth serves as a prime example of God’s freedom alongside human freedom to acknowledge God’s work granted through grace. How does his identification of her as the climax of God’s election of Israel relate to the particularity of her embodied experience as Theotokos? Does Barth’s treatment of Mary’s role in the incarnation discount agency over her body, especially if one accepts the logical priority of election over triunity? Does Mary’s humanity as eternally presumed for the identity of the Son give Mary any autonomy over her pregnancy? Is Barth’s treatment of Mary, especially in light of Mitzi Smith’s work on Mary as doule (slave), create a problematic surrogacy that warrants critique similar to what Dolores William’s directed toward substitutionary atonement?

This paper integrates the theory of mimetic desire with theology and pedagogy to offer an approach to the presentation of the lives of the saints in Catholic religious education, one which foregrounds the saints’ conversion of desire, encourages reflection on desire, and offers alternative models of desire. First, this paper briefly situates the saints in religious education and reviews literature on models in adolescent development. Second, it identifies three movements in the conversion of desire: renouncing acquisitive desire and reorienting one’s desire toward God, as described by René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, and a subsequent commitment to the imitation of God, supported by the theories of positive mimesis and affective conversion. It concludes with a framework for presenting the lives of the saints, using St. Ignatius of Loyola as a case study for inviting adolescents to reflect on their desires using a historical model. 

Mimetic theory, crip theology, and queer theology all accentuate the inadequacy of grounding identity in rigid categories. Where crip and queer theories critique binaries for their inability to hold the fluidity and instability of identity, mimetic theory identifies their power to fuel the dangerous cycle of blame, victimhood, and ultimately, violence. These insights from queer and crip theories offer a vital contribution. However, a danger remains: that “queer” or “crip” lose their original power and morph into reinscriptions of the exclusive categories they were designed to dismantle. Here, mimetic theory can help. This paper uses mimetic theory to construct new dimensions of the crip and queer critiques of identity categorizations. An identity grounded not in the social other, but in the Other, is capable of holding the expansive complexity of social and embodied fluidity, while also remaining detached from the sway of competitive and exclusionary relationality.