I have been doing lots of reading in European Philosophy.  I’ve discovered that I’m a closeted philosopher and theologian.  I’ve also discovered that ethics to me is much more of a political endeavor, always implicating communities.  The traces of the individual fall away from my work and I am captured in the impulse of building community.  My identity is formed by these engagements, relationships, and potentialities.  I am, by far, a person who thinks through actions and arrives at the place of togetherness.  I am speculative of most things politics, and especially things that demand confession.  I continue to look at experience, but experience that spans the human-world divide.  I look to material experiences, and the ways that matter, composite ‘stuff,’ manages to have a relationship to most everything, if not everything.  The entanglements that I encounter in my research provide an additional platform for my own thinking in the realm or domain of theology.  The philosophical problems of materiality and bodies point directly to the classic Thomist question:  Who is God and How do we Know?  Is God a body?  Does God have a body?  These are not simple answers.  We might say that God is simple, but what do we mean by this?  Is this a Spinozist reference?  We might say that God is complex.  But, again, what do we mean by this?  This is where my thinking is taking me toward identities and the complex nature of bodies, materiality, and knowledge.

While I’ve been writing the dissertation, I’ve occasionally been posting pictures of books.  I haven’t had a lot of time to blog.  This is largely been due to my commitment to getting a draft of the dissertation.  Well!  I have that draft and now am making revisions and so forth to hopefully defend very soon!  I hope to start blogging on a weekly basis, but haven’t quite found that rhythm.  I’ve been feeling a compulsion to explore my theological identity relative to my interest in doubt.  This has come as a result of my investigating theories of the body, Spinoza, and Deleuze.  I continue to be compelled by issues related to theology & ethics, feminism, queer issues, and race, and am hoping to find the right fit for a teaching job now that the dissertation has been written.  Blogging might become a new place for me to explore some of the other questions that I developed as I wrote my dissertation; namely, the question about one’s theological identity, when we all are seeking to jettison the impulse to stabilize identity.  Here’s to revisions and looking forward to the defense!

Another book for the dissertation.

I’m working thru Sharp’s book for my dissertation.

Hoping this text helps me think thru the body!

I’ve been doing lots of reading lately, and not a lot of writing.  It seems that though I am done with coursework, there still is a bit more to read–or, to my chagrin, a lot to read!  I actually love learning and reading, but at some point I have to start writing.

I’m enjoying the nature of the dissertation, because it gives me an opportunity to have a sustained academic thought–a place where my ideas can marinate for a bit.  So, that’s what I’m doing on this Saturday night–reading and learning.  Tonight its Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies.  I seem to appreciate her work…

Onward, as they say…

This is my current dissertation reading on materiality and ethics, epistemology and ontology.  I wanted to share it with y’all!