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.