PERFORMATIVE THEOLOGY
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Network for Performative Theology
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The purpose of this exposition is to collect data of what Performative Theology can be and become primarily within an academic research but also beyond. The expo will be a timespace nurtured by members the Network for Performative Theology, established 6 October 2022 in Oslo.
Thy will be done. DOING Theology THROUGH Diffractive Methodology
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The overall purpose of this thesis is to perform and propose diffractive methodology as a means for exploring, reading, learning, and understanding systematic theological discourses beyond binary and oppositional thinking. This methodology is based on performative strategies and feminist new materialist theory, with a specific focus on Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological agential realism theory; it can also be considered an alternative to a more traditional academic reflexive methodological approach, thus allowing for an infinite number of explorative methods to be developed within its umbrella definition of diffractive methodology. The diffractive analysis in this study is shaped as an intra-active entangled reading of Graham Ward’s Engaged Theology, through Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Performance Aesthetics, and the method I call Voicing-as-Performative-Theology. This thesis is divided into three parts. Part I unfolds relevant terminology. Part II performs the actual diffractive reading analysis. Part III consists of a concluding essay summarizing the outcome of this study’s diffractive reading, as well as opening up suggestions for how diffractive methodology can be applied for developing more performative and diffractive methods as part of future theological research.
The thesis will be presented at University College Stockholm (EHS), in January 8 2024.
"Convertere ad Deum Tuum": A Road Map Through the Landscape of Performative Theology
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is a bilingual presentation - in Swedish and in English - of two parallell tracks through the Landscape of Performative Theology. One of them is the result of a course taken during the Autumn of 2022, as part of my theological training towards priesthood in the Church of Sweden. The other track is a collection of entangled fragments part of a MA thesis in Systematic Theology were a diffractive reading is carried out through theologist Prof. Graham Ward's "How the light gets in. Ethical life I" (2016) and Prof. Erika Fischer Lichte's "The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics" (2008). This reading will also embrace results from the fields of Artistic Research and Performance Philosophy.
Letting NOTHING do itself
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Mark Douglas Edmund Price
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Western thought emphasises rival schools winning or losing debates: it speaks of knock-down arguments, fatal inconsistencies, of destroying, attacking, and defending positions. 'Philosophical triumph' is a sublimated mode of WOUNDING and SHAMING any opposition. The ancient Greeks used the word aischuné to talk of an opponent being 'put to
shame' – a feminine noun. The 'loser' of an argument is (dis-)figured as less rational, less human. Their Otherness is amplified until they capitulate. Canonical references to thinkers as midwives, nurses, or mothers of ideas are rare: such metaphors imply intimate co-operation and the fleshy, impure materiality of thought. Yet attempts to vanquish the canonical masculine-dominator style of thought with some version of a non-wounding, compassionate mode of thinking readily mimic the power-structures and gender-binaries they seek to oppose. This 'war-model of thought' is ultimately nihilistic – it characterises differences as antitheses, then seeks to destroy the 'opposition'. Such is the problem we seek to address.
During the last two years we have explored philosophical, theological, and aesthetic issues via a praxis-led 'Ornamentation' method. Starting from NOTHING, we allow elements which seem meaningless in themselves to ‘flash up’ (Barad 2017), entangle through intra-action,
accumulating and complexifying the material 'on its own terms', becoming poetic, scholastic and ecstatic. Unknown to one-another, neither contributor has any 'territory' or 'position' to attack or defend. This is not a dialogue, a dialectic, nor even 'two persons making something together'. It is a trans-human performance, a method for allowing the space and material between the contributors to “endlessly open [...] to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings” (Hinton 2013:182); “blasting, bursting open, and scattering […] to effect a complete reorganization of meaning” (Barad 2017:41); becoming a/live environment - an ecology in which the world can create itself.
The purpose of this exposition is to collect data of what Performative Theology can be and become primarily within an academic research but also beyond. The expo will be a timespace nurtured by members the Network for Performative Theology, established 6 October 2022 in Oslo.open exposition comments (0)