The Door of No Return: An Africana Reading of Complexity

This chapter traces how ancestral fragments evidenced in the embodied epistemology of afro-Caribbean “bomba” dancing and drumming haunt social and material reality as well as their theorization. Opening a space in affect studies for conversation between complexity theory, Dionne Brand, and Édouard Glissant, the chapter argues that the ghosts created by trauma, and the knowledge-fragments they keep, not only inform justice claims fragments, but may shape the fabric of reality.

Vascularizing the Study of Religion: Multi-Agent Figurations and Cosmopolitics

Drawing from Bruno Latour and using the case of La Luz del Mundo, a Mexican Pentecostal church in Atlanta, as an example, this chapter demonstrates the payoffs of a non-reductive, materialist, networks approach to the study of religion. By embedding embodied, historical human actors in vascularized and inter-active ecological figurations from which they have evolved, and through and within which they carve out shared and contested spaces of livelihood, this approach moves beyond the Cartesian-Kantian model of the sovereign, unified, and buffered subject dominant in Western modernity and religious studies, more specifically, allowing for a rich exploration of the multiple processes and materials that make religious phenomena efficacious. The chapter concludes by endorsing Isabelle Stengers’s notion of a cosmopolitics that is maximally inclusive in its engagement with alterity.

Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology

Any materialism that honors its matter will find itself entangled in a rich and contradictory history of religious bodies. This essay muses on the spectrum running from a conservative “Christian materialism” to a polyamorous panentheism, all by way of an ancient legacy manifesting, in for instance its biblical forcefield, in figures of creation and new creation, of material justice, incarnation, and ritual embodiment. By way of a Whiteheadian reading of Barad’s quantum entanglement of physics and ethics along with Bennett’s vital materialism, this essay considers—in the face of looming planetary catastrophe—the religious meaning of an apophatic matter sacramentally embodied in all our entangled differences.

The Trouble with Commonality: Theology, Evolutionary Theory, and Creaturely Kinship

This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theological figure of creaturely life. Analyzing confessions of creaturely kinship from both theologians and evolutionary science, the chapter argues against a reading of creaturely kinship that sees this bond as merely a form of commonality, or sameness. Working with contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad, as well as the early modern philosopher Anne Conway, the essay argues for a reading of creaturely kinship as a diffractive relational bond—one that highlights the differences and plurality in creaturely life and sees, in creatureliness, a “connective distinction” or a difference that also binds.

Stubborn Materiality: African American Religious Naturalism and Becoming Our Humanity

This chapter describes the emergence of an African-American religious naturalism that has affinities with theoretical developments offering new materialist views of the human. It proposes a humanistic discourse that resists both problematic forms of anthropocentricism implicit in modern humanism and questionable racial differentials reinforced by Enlightenment ideals. The chapter introduces scientific theories advanced by the tenets of religious naturalism that help to envision humanity as a specific life form, or as nature made aware of itself. With the concept of sacred humanity, it explores humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep relationality and interconnectedness become key metaphors for understanding what constitutes our processes of becoming human. This naturalistic view of humanity is set within the context of African-American culture and history to underscore the conceptual richness of the liberationist motif within black religiosity and to celebrate its enduring legacy.

Introduction: Tangled Matters

It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering. What matters in our ethics, our politics, our worlds entangles us in and as new materializations. And at this juncture, it entangles scholarship in retrievals and rethinkings of matter itself. Even disciplines that struggle with long histories of disembodied transcendence are registering the effects.

Theophanic Materiality: Political Ecology, Inhuman Touch, and the Art of Andy Goldsworthy

This chapter pursues the queerly constructive task of rethinking the strange entanglements of divinity and matter in the wake of the ecological crises of the anthropocene. Seduced simultaneously by the “land art” (especially cairns) of Andy Goldsworthy, the “new materialisms” of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, and the theophany traditions of Christian thought, this chapter constructs a concept of “theophanic materiality,” where divine energy is entangled in the performance of indeterminate material agencies. Goldsworthy’s artistic process of collaboration with and in place helps theology think anew the fluid possibilities of creativity. That is to say, placing land art in conversation with new materialisms and theologies of creation creates at least one conceptual possibility for the queer intimacy of divinity and earth. To construct such a theology, therefore, might help to effect a reimagined political response to the exploitative systems of human power that bring about our contemporary ecological crises.

The Matter with Pantheism: On Shepherds and Goat-Gods and Mountains and Monsters

This chapter reflects critically upon the position that most straightforwardly aligns materiality and divinity: pantheism. First, the chapter diagnoses the nearly-universal denigration of this term among western theologians and philosophers as something like queer panic: a fear of the coincidence of categories that “ought” to be kept separate like God and dirt, spirit and matter, divinity and sexuality. Second, it sketches a conceptually viable “pantheism” by reanimating the “pan.” From the hills of Arcadia through the stable in Bethlehem to a New Jersey suburb, we begin to glimpse a “multipantheology” that affirms the autopoetic, emergent, vibrantly material universe as what we mean by “God.”

Grace in Intra-action: Complementarity and the Noncircular Gift

Commonly, grace is defined as a free gift—in opposition to exchange. Key perspectives in twentieth century Gift theory link this particularly Protestant concept of grace with the individualism and commodification that a fossil fuel addicted capitalism depends on. It also remains unclear how this concept of grace can relate to an intra-actively exchangist world except by interruption or annihilation. This essay argues that while the ideal gift, free of exchange, must be challenged, space for uncapitalized returns and even losses in our gift-investments must be preserved. This particular tide grace as a non-circular gift can resist. Consequently, what are commonly held to be competing and incompatible concepts—unconditional grace and the exchangist, intra-active universe—are actually complementary disruptions of key economic practices contributing to climate change.

Interdisciplinary Ethics: From Astro-Theology to Cosmo-Liberation Theology

Here early modern “Astro-Theology” (William Derham 1715) is revised to produce a constructive postmodern astro-theology. This revisionary astro-theology includes a panentheistic theology and cosmology, plus a metaphysical realism essential to meeting the ethical challenge of realism (Reinhold Niebuhr 1932). Recognizing that Christian ethics is reality-based can be liberating. Hence, a revisionary astro-theology can be righty described as an astro-liberation theology, or better, as a cosmo-liberation theology.