“It is certainly the case that many cultural traditions with their varying modes of reasoning are already embedded within Christianity. The Bible alone contains texts that celebrate different and sometimes conflicting accounts of the world, exposing a range of rationalities that are expressed in a variety of genres. But even more important for theology’s work today is the complicated multitude of cultures within which Christianity is rooted. As Thomas Reynolds neatly points out, “being religious—being Christian—already entails being ‘beyond’ one’s own local faith perspective, [it entails] being inter religious. Pluralism affects religious affirmations from the root.” Pluralism here refers to the polysemic intersections, dissonances, relations, and syncretic accretions of multiple stories, experiences, presences, cultures, religious traditions and modes of reasoning that lead to Christian theology’s positions and aversions. Theology that has grown over the course of millennia cannot help but result, in hindsight, in a kind of “polyphonic bricolage.”” — Laurel Schneider

The above passage is taken from Laurel Schneider’s contribution to the book Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness; her piece is titled The Gravity of Love: Theopoetics and Ontological Imagination. It’s really, really good.

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Painting above by Hannah Yata

Tags:ChristianityLaurel SchneiderpluralismPoetrytheologytheopoetics