Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prelude: the arguments of this book
- Chapter 1 Recasting ‘systematic theology’: gender, desire, and théologie totale
- Chapter 2 Doing theology ‘on Wigan Pier’: why feminism and the social sciences matter to theology
- Chapter 3 Praying the Trinity: a neglected patristic tradition
- Chapter 4 The charismatic constituency: embarrassment or riches?
- Chapter 5 Seeing God: trinitarian thought through iconography
- Chapter 6 ‘Batter My Heart’: reorientations of classic trinitarian thought
- Chapter 7 The primacy of divine desire: God as Trinity and the ‘apophatic turn’
- Coda: conclusions and beyond
- Glossary of technical terms and names
- Scripture index
- General index
Preface and acknowledgements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prelude: the arguments of this book
- Chapter 1 Recasting ‘systematic theology’: gender, desire, and théologie totale
- Chapter 2 Doing theology ‘on Wigan Pier’: why feminism and the social sciences matter to theology
- Chapter 3 Praying the Trinity: a neglected patristic tradition
- Chapter 4 The charismatic constituency: embarrassment or riches?
- Chapter 5 Seeing God: trinitarian thought through iconography
- Chapter 6 ‘Batter My Heart’: reorientations of classic trinitarian thought
- Chapter 7 The primacy of divine desire: God as Trinity and the ‘apophatic turn’
- Coda: conclusions and beyond
- Glossary of technical terms and names
- Scripture index
- General index
Summary
Preface and acknowledgements
This book assumed its first, preliminary, shape a very long time ago, in the 1990s, when I was invited to give the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge University. Soon afterwards, when I migrated to a new post at Harvard, I became rapidly – and vividly – aware of the barriers of cultural difference that made my undertaking, indeed my whole theological approach, bemusing to my new American interlocutors, and especially to those in the liberal religious tradition. The impenitent philosophical realism in this project, the absolute centrality granted to the practice of prayer, the talk of the entanglement of ‘sexuality’ and ‘spirituality’ (both terms laden with different cultural baggage in the two continents), the insistence that early Christian – and especially celibate, monastic – traditions could throw some crucial and positive light on celebrated current dilemmas about ‘sex’ and ‘gender’: these traits were seen as at best quaintly English or Anglican, and at worst manifestations of a feminist false consciousness. Thus, for a long time the project was shelved while I reflected with real seriousness on the force of such criticisms, adjusted to my new cultural milieu, and took stock of the concomitant resistance, in an era of postmodernity, to the very project of a Christian systematic theology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- God, Sexuality, and the SelfAn Essay 'On the Trinity', pp. xiii - xxPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013