Theopoetics guides a literary artist toward contextualizing experience and shepherds the intangibility of experience into art, turning confused isolation into a reach for the communal, all with an eye toward faith, hope, and love — charity in its true sense. It’s this act of making incarnate coupled with the intention of pursuing the divine that makes an act of theopoetics, which results in a tangible piece of art. The truth of theopoetics becomes self-evident as it is practiced artistically: the paradox that poetry values and embraces is the very same mystery that theology wades through. God is elusive and exhaustive, abstract and familiar, obscure and fecund, ethereal and manifest. God is with us just as we are with God.

The above passage comes from an essay titled “The Theopoetics of Literature: An Aesthetic Statement” by Dave Harrity and Martha Serpas. The full essay is featured in the very first issue of THEOPOETICS, a journal of theological imagination, literature, embodiment, and aesthetics.

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Photograph above by Luca Zanier

Tags:Callid Keefe-PerryDave Harritymartha serpasmysterytheologytheopoetics