Abstract
This short work is as arresting and original as any the author has written about theology and sexuality. Like most teachers of theology he inhabits a world where ‘course descriptions are habitual fictions – when they are not vain boasts’ (p. 4); where intrusive surveillance requires us to become ‘an interchangeable expert or fluent purveyor of required information’ (p. 54); or where ‘[m]uch church talk about ministerial formation traffics in fantasies’ (p. 148). Much theology in the university is still regarded ‘as a body of knowledge’, or as a prerequisite to ministerial formation. A consequence is the assumption that ‘it cannot be handed down by visionary transmission or the repeated meditation of texts that shatter language’ (pp. 9–10).
The arrangement of the book demonstrates his core conviction, achieved through a lifetime of dedicated teaching, that ‘books about teaching are often less helpful than books that teach’ (p. 157). Four pairs of books (all Christian classics) are described and contrasted with each other. The comparisons are highly unusual. So, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina is matched with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology – the virgin martyr with the theology of deliberate ‘per-version’ and lust. Even here there is agreement: that ‘teaching theology must engage the body’, whether Macrina’s, which ‘attracts unwanted desires, develops cancers, carries scars’, or Althaus-Reid’s bodies, which ‘smell in summer heat, need costumes, have orgasms in unexpected places – and with unapproved partners’ (p. 52).
The remaining pairs of books evoke more striking contrasts. Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Path into God is contrasted with Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be: ‘the dark light of Bonaventure’s road to Golgotha’ with Tillich’s abandonment of theology ‘along with its cultural despisers’ (p. 77). Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle is contrasted with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both of them examples of theological imagination, reminding and instructing contemporary teachers of theology that part of their work ‘is to restore the student’s capacity for attentive imagining’ (p. 107).
C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is contrasted with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. ‘If Lewis’ children join Aslan’s cause to flourish, Lauren must reject her father’s Christianity and flee his home to survive. Side by side, the two books show the complications of conversion and resistance’ (p. 125). Kierkegaard’s (i.e. Johannes Climacus’s) Philosophical Crumbs invites us to imagine ‘a last generation so late in time, so engulfed by chatter, that it can hear a profession of faith only when it appears as an ironic question posed by a writer who will never claim to be a Christian’ (p. 141). Simone Weil’s Letters and Essays equally reveals a believing author whose sheer faith actually prevented her from receiving the Christian sacraments.
Readers are frequently invited to undertake exercises that invite critical interrogation of their own practices and assumptions about their teaching. They will find in this book irony, humour, ambush, imagination and critique. Above all, they will find a deep concern for the teaching of theology.