Abstract
“Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul cannot live in that narrow place—this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life … There is freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption—beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.”1 With these words, fantasy and science-fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin offers a new direction for her Earthsea Trilogy. The first three books of the trilogy explore how the wizards of Earthsea work to maintain the metaphysical balance that when disrupted is supposed to threaten the physical existence of Earthsea. In Tehanu, the fourth book of the series, LeGuin shatters the perceived need for metaphysical balance. Here, life is not lived in metaphysical balances but beyond them.
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Notes
Ursula K. LeGuin, Tehanu (New York: Atheneum, 1990), 194.
Gregory of Nazianzus, trans. Frederick Williams, “Oration 28,” in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2002), 28.7.
Sonia Kruks, “Simone de Beavoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University, 2010), 258–260.
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University, 1994), 89.
Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman (Burlington, VT, Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), Chapter 1.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006), 14.
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 82.
For the dementia piece in particular, see Susan H. McFadden and John T. McFadden, Aging Together: Dementia, Friendship, and Flourishing Communities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2011).
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 57.
Russell Samolsky, Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (New York: Fordham University, 2011), 98.
See, for example, George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1984).
Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 1–9.
AdaMaría Isasi-Díaz, “Identificate con Nosotros: A Mujerista Christological Understanding,” in Jesus in the Hispanic Community: Images of Christ from Theology to Popular Religion, ed. Harold J. Recinos and Hugo Magallanes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 48.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, The History of Disability Series, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 337.
Ivan Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic, Reclaiming Liberation Theology (London: SCM Press, 2008), 84.
Karen Baker-Fletcher, “The Erotic in Contemporary Black Women’s Writings,” in Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic, ed. Dwight Hopkins and Anthony Pinn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 204–207.
See, for an example of such a limitation, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983).
Roderick T. Leupp, The Renewal of Trinitarian Theology: Themes, Patterns, & Explorations (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2008), 15. Bruce Marshall expresses a similar sentiment in his preface to Trinity and Truth, “A Christian theological account of most matters needs to bear a Trinitarian stamp.” Bruce Marshall, Trinity and Truth, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xii.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 50th anniversary expanded ed. (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001, 1951).
Sarah Coakley, “Afterword: ‘Relational Ontology,’ Trinity, and Science,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorn (Cambridge and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 185–192.
See Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University, 2013). Coakley’s attempt to create space for feminist theologies within trinitarian theologies is limited by her lack of nuance in relation to contemporary gender studies. For example, Coakley states, “Gender is not static, not fixed into the seemingly immovable stuckness of what secular theory gloomily calls ‘the gender binary,’” 59. This statement suggests that most gender theory operates in this gender binary when gender theorists have challenged the gender binary since at least Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble. In another example of Coakley’s misunderstanding of contemporary gender theory, Coakley contends, “Hence a théologia totale refuses to reduce doctrine to mere effect of social, political, or patriarchal conditions. For once such a reductive hermeneutics of suspicion is allowed to triumph over the (eternal, divine) invitation to charity, forgiveness, and reconciliation, a new idolatry has also triumphed: that of anger stuck in victimology, and the implicit recreation of a ‘God’ made merely in my own image,” 84. This statement accuses feminists of prioritizing their anger with patriarchal systems over the forgiveness and reconciliation of God when many feminists would describe their anger not in dichotomous relationship to the love of God but as foundational for that love. See
Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love: Christian Ethics for Women and Other Strangers,” in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1985), 3–21.
Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 69–117.
Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002, 1992), 45.
Sallie McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001), 145.
Hannah Bacon, What’s Right with the Trinity? Conversations in Feminist Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
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© 2014 Meredith Minister
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Minister, M. (2014). Possibilities of a Material Trinitarian Theology. In: Trinitarian Theology and Power Relations. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464781_2
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