Through novels, speculative fiction (and its critics), and cinema these papers expand theological, ethical, and religious archives. In each, questions of representation and transparency are approached sideways rather than through presumed translatability. Emily Theus asks what happens to theology when it finds itself within unthinkability in the context of climate crisis. What do the limits of representation within speculative and literary writing tell us about the hopes theology invests in representation? Amy Carr contrasts speculative fiction's capacity - via Lois McMaster Bujold - to present a world where religious conflict takes place against a shared background of empirical knowledge with the impossibility of such knowledge in the world we inhabit. Joel Mayward develops an account of theocinematics as a theology of creation in works by Darren Aronofsky and Terence Malik, while Connie Bahng reads Keum Suk Gendry-Kim's novel *Grass* through Derrida's hauntology to ask what ethical challenges generational trauma confronts us with.
This paper considers how we might construe the task of Christian theological reflection in light of the created unthinkability of ecological crisis characterized by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement. According to Ghosh, the concealment of nonhuman agencies is both a driver of climate crisis and an obstacle to response. The reception of Ghosh’s work—ranging from how quickly it has become a point of reference to the controversy it has generated around speculative fiction—reflects aspirations toward humanistic inquiry (including theology) that might move us beyond inaction, often through new or better strategies of representation. Noting theological stakes at play in this reception, particularly related to his critique of the literary novel and the questions of mediation and representation it implicates, I ask what it would look like to understand the task of theological reflection as located within, and responsible to, the impasse of unthinkability Ghosh identifies.
In her Chalion novels, speculative fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold creates a world in which Quintarian (five-god) and Quadrarian (four-god) religions compete against the backdrop of older shamanistic practices. Nevertheless, this world’s human inhabitants share beliefs about the holy that are confirmed in collectively-shared, even empirically-verifiable experiences. Ironically, this homogenizing certainty about the spiritual order may contribute to the appeal of Chalion novels to religious believers and skeptics alike. Why does our own world lack the public verifications of ultimate reality that occur within speculative fiction like Bujold’s (or in speculative fiction that confirms the convictions of “our” world’s religions, like Lewis’s Narnia series)? Tillich’s *Dynamics of Faith* offers conceptual resources for answering this question, and for making sense of how speculative fiction interacts with readers’ hunger for a certainty about sharing religious/metaphysical experience that always eludes us—and must elude us in any authentic religious life, any actual world.
Can certain films not merely depict, but actually _do_ theological reflection through the cinematic form? In answering this question in the affirmative, I wish to present a cinematic theology—or a “theocinematics”—of the Christian doctrine of creation on display in the films of two contemporary American filmmakers, with their recent films as case studies: Terrence Malick’s _The Tree of Life_ (2011) and _A Hidden Life_ (2019), and Noah Aronofsky’s _Noah_ (2014) and _mother!_ (2017). I wish to suggest that these films do not so much present or illustrate a systematic theological viewpoint, but rather invite us into the theological work dynamically occurring within themselves. Indeed, rather than a conceptual, propositional, and systematic approach to the questions of God and creation, theocinematics is an experiential, affective, and imaginative mode of engaging with the activity of the divine in our created world.
My paper engages Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim through the lens of Jacque Derrida’s hauntology as a theological and ethical methodology, analyzing the ethical imperative brought by the ghostly face of colonial, generational and collective trauma. Grass is an antiwar, biographical graphic novel telling the story of Okseon Lee, a Korean girl forced into sexual slavery as a comfort woman for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. In doing so, I slow down the affectively nuanced ethical reactions and disruptions evoked by the oppressed and asks what is the invitation of the oppressed specters when she comes? Taking a cue from Derrida’s analysis of the father ghost Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I analyze Grass story as the visual medium of Okseon’s haunt of colonialism, sexism, and war using Derrida’s hauntological categories regarding haunts, exorcism, and hospitality as well as feminist, trauma-informed, and post-colonial thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty, Mayra Rivera, Shelly Rambo, and Wonhee Anne Joh.