| dc.description.abstract | This project focuses on Christian theological superiority vis-à-vis religious others, arguing that notions of Christian normativity and ultimacy are affectually entangled in Christian theologies and embodied practices. In brief, I trace trends in Christian theological superiority, from early Christian relations with Jewish traditions and communities, to more contemporary emergences in North American contexts. Drawing on the affect theory of Sara Ahmed, I describe how superiority is a feeling that is embedded in a Christian affective economy of power and relation. Ahmed’s critical approach helps to address how superiority might be inculcated, even unintentionally, in Christian theologies, practices, and communities, such that Christian relations with religious others are subtly governed by exclusive conceptions or feelings related to Christian traditions as having ultimate significance and universal relevance. From a theological standpoint, I use Rosemary Radford Ruether’s groundbreaking text Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974) to demonstrate that superiority is endemic, haunting Christianity from its origins as a living tradition. In several chapters, I discuss theological texts in the history of Christian traditions to draw historical connections to the work of three contemporary American theologians (Willie James Jennings, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, John B. Cobb, Jr.), who variously use critical race theory, feminist theology, and process philosophy as resources to address Christian relations with religious others, in the context of religious pluralism and interfaith engagement. The guiding norm and overarching argument of my project is that Christian superiority is a problem that has deep theological roots. As such, Christian theologians must critically account for this embedded superiority in order to engage in holistic relationships with religious others and to imagine the theological possibilities of a Christianity-without-superiority. | |
