The theologies that brought us here are not the theologies that will lead us forward.
Audre Lorde said it plainly: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The same is true of our inherited God-talk. The Eurocentric theologies that have dominated Western Christianity for centuries brought us real gifts — and also gave cover to hierarchies, exclusion, and the slow destruction of the earth. Now they are losing something else: their explanatory power. In a pluralistic world, in a post-Newtonian universe, the old frameworks are running out of room.
Something new is needed. Or rather, something very old — recovered, dusted off, and taken seriously again.
I am a biblical scholar, theologian, and Episcopal priest, and I have spent my career asking what happens when we stop explaining away the strange, vulnerable, fully-present God of the biblical text and start actually embracing that kind of god. What if divine limitation is not an embarrassment to be smoothed over by philosophical theology — but the very thing that makes God capable of genuine relationship with the world?
That question drives everything I write.
My book A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God — winner of the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion — is the opening move in a series that takes this question seriously. It argues for a God who grieves, relents, and experiences emotion: not a primitive anthropomorphism to be corrected, but a profound theological claim the church has been too timid to inhabit.
The conversation is underway. Come find out where it leads.
Here are a few of my writings that are accessible online:
Seduction on the Threshing Floor, Bible Odyssey
Following Merton into a ‘Useless Life’ in Bearings Online
What’s So Bad About Original Sin? in The Los Angeles Review of Books
The First Hundred Days in The Los Angeles Review of Books
Sterilizing the Bible, The Marginalia Review of Books