In this Book

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What does theology have to say about the place of eroticism in the salvific transformation of men and women, even of the cosmos itself? How, in turn, does eros infuse theological practice and transfigure doctrinal tropes? Avoiding the well-worn path of sexual moralizing while also departing decisively from Anders Nygren’s influential insistence that Christian agape must have nothing to do with worldly eros, this book explores what is still largely uncharted territory in the realm of theological erotics. The ascetic, the mystical, the seductive, the ecstatic—these are the places where the divine and the erotic may be seen to converge and love and desire to commingle.

Inviting and performing a mutual seduction of disciplines, the volume brings philosophers, historians, biblical scholars, and theologians into a spirited conversation that traverses the limits of conventional orthodoxies, whether doctrinal or disciplinary. It seeks new openings for the emergence of desire, love, and pleasure, while challenging common understandings of these terms. It engages risk at the point where the hope for salvation paradoxically endangers the safety of subjects—in particular, of theological subjects—by opening them to those transgressions of eros in which boundaries, once exceeded, become places of emerging possibility.

The eighteen chapters, arranged in thematic clusters, move fluidly among and between premodern and postmodern textual traditions—from Plato to Emerson, Augustine to Kristeva, Mechthild to Mattoso, the Shulammite to Molly Bloom, the Zohar to the Da Vinci Code. In so doing, they link the sublime reaches of theory with the gritty realities of politics, the boundless transcendence of God with the poignant transience of materiality.

Table of Contents

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  1. Title Page
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  1. About the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Introduction: Theology and Eros after Nygren
  2. pp. xiii-xxi
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  1. Part I: Restaging the Symposium on Love
  1. What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Platonic Love?
  2. pp. 3-22
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  1. Flesh in Confession: Alcibiades Beside Augustine
  2. pp. 23-37
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  1. For the Love of God: The Death of Desire and the Gift of Life
  2. pp. 38-62
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  1. Part II: Queer Desires
  1. Sexing the Pauline Body of Christ: Scriptural Sex in the Context of the American Christian Culture War
  2. pp. 65-98
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  1. Homoerotic Spectacle and the Monastic Body in Symeon the New Theologian
  2. pp. 99-118
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  1. Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines
  2. pp. 119-133
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  1. Feetishism: The Scent of a Latin American Body Theology
  2. pp. 134-152
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  1. Digital Bodies and the Transformation of the Flesh
  2. pp. 153-166
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  1. Part III: Sacred Suffering, Sublime Seduction
  1. Passion—Binding—Passion
  2. pp. 169-193
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  1. Praying Is Joying: Musings on Love in Evagrius Ponticus
  2. pp. 194-204
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  1. Carthage Didn’t Burn Hot Enough: Saint Augustine’s Divine Seduction
  2. pp. 205-217
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  1. Part IV: Cosmos, Eros, Creativity
  1. American Transcendentalism’s Erotic Aquatecture
  2. pp. 221-233
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  1. ‘‘She Talks Too Much’’: Magdalene Meditations
  2. pp. 234-254
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  1. Ethical Desires: Toward a Theology of Relational Transcendence
  2. pp. 255-270
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  1. New Creations: Eros, Beauty, and the Passion for Transformation
  2. pp. 271-287
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  1. Part V: Rereading the Song of Songs
  1. Lyrical Theology: The Song of Songs and the Advantage of Poetry
  2. pp. 291-305
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  1. The Shulammite’s Song: Divine Eros, Ascending and Descending
  2. pp. 306-340
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  1. Suffering Eros and Textual Incarnation: A Kristevan Reading of Kabbalistic Poetics
  2. pp. 341-365
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  1. Afterword: A Theology of Eros, After Transfiguring Passion
  2. pp. 366-374
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 375-463
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 465-469
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