My research advances the fields of theology, sexuality, and gender in an abolitionist direction. I start from an axiom of queer theory: queerness is about a marginal relation to power rather than a homogenized gender or sexual identity; it names a commitment to dismantling systems of domination instead of seeking rights and recognition within them. Accordingly, one through-line in my work is the lived theologies of queer counterpublics—that is, world-making projects in which gender, sexual, and other outsiders experiment with new modes of living together premised on mutual aid rather than state power.
My first book project, Spirit: A Brief Systematic Theology, constructs a pneumatological framework for analyzing the varieties of collective agency involved in queer world-making—from the joint autonomy that friends exercise in virtue of loving their irreplaceable life together, to the group agency that more diffuse collectives like churches or unions can exercise in virtue of fungible roles and institutional protocols.
On the basis of clues in Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Barth, and others, this book develops a new model of the Spirit from the insight that a close friendship—in all its messiness, through cycles of rupture and repair—is a plural person, an irreducible center of valuing and acting, in the same way that an individual person is an irreducible center of valuing and acting. I argue that the Spirit is a plural person in just this sense: the Father’s and the Son’s friendship eternally constitutes the Spirit, a joint personal identity irreducible to the other trinitarian identities. The Spirit’s work in the economy of grace is to form plural persons with particular human believers at particular places and times. God eternally determines to be Godself through these friendships that particularize the divine plenitude in new ways. One implication of this model is that theologians cannot make sense of God apart from human context, nor of doctrine apart from the exigencies of particular human lives.
My second book project, Queer Theologies, Abolition Geographies, makes a theological case for the revolutionary pleasures of queer world-making. In so doing, it frees the field from a deadlock between the two methodologies that currently dominate queer theological reflection: apologetic theologies (on the one hand) that defend queer ecclesial inclusion on the basis of liberal notions of decency, and apophatic theologies (on the other) that reject such apologetic approaches on the basis of political nihilism.
My third book project, tentatively titled NeuroChurches, will develop a neuroqueer theology rooted in virtual counterpublics where autistic and ADHD Christians co-create new theological models to resist the ableist stories that behavioral scientists tell about them.
Each of these projects reimagines the genre of systematic theology as intrinsically contextual. Indeed, in my first book, I build my pneumatology and the brief systematic theology it shores up from the queerness of human friendship, a bond that people improvise outside legal and ecclesial dictates. I thereby establish theological grounding for starting with contextual particulars to address systematic questions—as I do in my subsequent projects.
My first book project, Spirit: A Brief Systematic Theology, constructs a pneumatological framework for analyzing the varieties of collective agency involved in queer world-making—from the joint autonomy that friends exercise in virtue of loving their irreplaceable life together, to the group agency that more diffuse collectives like churches or unions can exercise in virtue of fungible roles and institutional protocols.
On the basis of clues in Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Barth, and others, this book develops a new model of the Spirit from the insight that a close friendship—in all its messiness, through cycles of rupture and repair—is a plural person, an irreducible center of valuing and acting, in the same way that an individual person is an irreducible center of valuing and acting. I argue that the Spirit is a plural person in just this sense: the Father’s and the Son’s friendship eternally constitutes the Spirit, a joint personal identity irreducible to the other trinitarian identities. The Spirit’s work in the economy of grace is to form plural persons with particular human believers at particular places and times. God eternally determines to be Godself through these friendships that particularize the divine plenitude in new ways. One implication of this model is that theologians cannot make sense of God apart from human context, nor of doctrine apart from the exigencies of particular human lives.
My second book project, Queer Theologies, Abolition Geographies, makes a theological case for the revolutionary pleasures of queer world-making. In so doing, it frees the field from a deadlock between the two methodologies that currently dominate queer theological reflection: apologetic theologies (on the one hand) that defend queer ecclesial inclusion on the basis of liberal notions of decency, and apophatic theologies (on the other) that reject such apologetic approaches on the basis of political nihilism.
My third book project, tentatively titled NeuroChurches, will develop a neuroqueer theology rooted in virtual counterpublics where autistic and ADHD Christians co-create new theological models to resist the ableist stories that behavioral scientists tell about them.
Each of these projects reimagines the genre of systematic theology as intrinsically contextual. Indeed, in my first book, I build my pneumatology and the brief systematic theology it shores up from the queerness of human friendship, a bond that people improvise outside legal and ecclesial dictates. I thereby establish theological grounding for starting with contextual particulars to address systematic questions—as I do in my subsequent projects.