Unreasoned Care

“Unreasoned Care” returns us to God through a sojourn with Foucault’s archives. This chapter queerly attends to how the Process God as Eros of the Universe might open us to a non-redemptive or counter-salvific and yet ethically attentive theology that sticks with the mad we’ve condemned, confined, and left unredeemed. Reading with Lynne Huffer’s re-engagement with Foucault’s History of Madness, this chapter argues for an ethics of care for the ghosts of those an emphasis on reason, straightness, saneness, health, and wealth have ransomed for the rise of the productive model citizen. Placing Foucault and Whitehead into conversation offers us a theo-ethic of grave attending to those ransomed for our redemption. Such an encounter helps us to acknowledge the past that has caused the world to be thus, and to salvage dreams of a world that can be otherwise.

Unsaved Time

Chapter two, “Unsaved Time,” uncovers the temporal structures nurtured by the eschatological and counter-eschatological orientations within radical orthodox and radical theologies. It then places such temporalities into dialogue with: Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday theology; the queer temporalities of Heather Love, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman; and Robin James’s feminist critique of resilience. From this dialogue is constructed the concept of bipolar time as a Saturday and mad resistance to neoliberal time. Bipolar time, a time saturated by unnerving feelings, can offer ways in which we might better learn to touch and feel a counter-capitalist hope in mania, depression, and their interpenetration. In practicing both the fall into the bed and the flight into the world, bipolar time seeks not a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire (a Sunday for its Friday), but rather questions the very nature of resurrection. It gravely attends to, or pauses to care for, our own damage in ways that reveal what has been, what might have been, and what might be.

Unbegun Introductions

“Unbegun Introductions” maps the contemporary state of political theology, most significantly its engagement with postsecularism and autonomist Marxism; the contemporary fields of affect, queer temporality, and crip theories; and gives a brief introduction to process theology. This chapter maps the key fields with which the rest of the manuscript will then constructively play in order to bring to bear the significance of contemporary affect and crip theory for the doing of postmodern and political theology. Interspersed amongst this mapping are narrative scenes—personal stories that bring to the fore the way in which the moods of everyday life function as the contexts from which the assemblages of thinkers come to matter. The introductory chapter refuses to separate the personal mood from the political or philosophical one.

Unproductive Worth

“Unproductive Worth” reads with the autonomism of Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Kathi Weeks, the political and quotidian depression of Ann Cvetkovich, and a disability poetics in order to challenge both neoliberal and more progressive (the latter represented in this chapter by Hardt and Negri and their theological deployment by Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui Lan) productivist theologies that tie our worth to our “productive” contribution to society. As a counter to such a productivist soteriology, this chapter suggest we remain unredeemed by tapping into the post-work imaginary of Weeks, the utopia of ordinary habit of Cvetkovich, and a crip poetics inspired by Robert McRuer. The chapter suggests that we must pay grave attention to all those considered too slow, too mad, too depressed, too crippled to be of productive worth.

Unattended Affect

“Unattended Affect” asks to which affects and archives we have not trustily attended. Engaging black studies and black political theology, most particularly in the work of Fred Moten and Kelly Brown Douglas, this concluding chapter draws a picture of how a political theology of the unredeemed might take shape when it gravely attends to the spaces of blackness unwilling to participate in the making proper on offer by white supremacy. Following the work of Moten, this chapter argues that it is in the unattended affects, those left open by the unpaid debt of whiteness to blackness, where a political theology of and for the unredeemed might take its most forceful shape. Surmising that it is in part our inability to sit with individual and collective guilt over these debts that stands in the way of societal transformation, in this conclusion grave attending is offered as a mode of witness and resistance to these sites of cheap and violent redemption.

Unwilling Feeling

Chapter four, “Unwilling Feeling,” reads John D. Caputo’s material theology and his conception of the insistence of God alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on what she names “affect aliens” and willfulness to offer biblical scenes of affect alien prophets. Jonah and Martha embody such moody prophecy in this scene. The chapter constructs and applies an affect hermeneutic to and with biblical texts in order to read for what might happen when we follow moodiness to unexpected theological conclusions. Jonah’s and Martha’s moodiness in their biblical tales reveal not what’s wrong with them, but rather serve as a lament against problematic theological interpretations and conscriptions of each character. These affect alien prophets exist as blockage; their existence stops up or slows down the normative flow. These biblical characters prophetically persist by remaining moody impediments to the story. To gravely attend to such prophets is to embrace alternate flows or undercurrents within the biblical story. Such an embrace invites us to look for alternate flows within our contemporary stories.