Theopoetics and Religious Difference

In this study, Marius van Hoogstraten seeks to come to an understanding of the interreligious that embraces the ambiguity, historicity, and dynamic relationality of religious difference - in a word, its unruliness. While many approaches in theology implicitly recognize this unruliness, they typically try to bring it under control, to pacify it, or keep it at a distance. Instead, the author proposes turning to the 'theopoetics' - approaches to theology marked by both uncertainty and creativity - of the contemporary philosophers and theologians Richard Kearney, John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller to envision the interreligious as the non-site of an aporetic relatedness neither secondary to religious identity nor indicative of an underlying unity, making it possible for an inter-religious solidarity to emerge from the depths of difference.

Born 1985; 2019 PhD; previously worked as a research associate at the University of Hamburg and as a peace worker with the Mennonite church in Berlin; currently postdoctoral researcher at the Mennonite Seminary in Amsterdam and a pastor in the Mennonite congregation in Hamburg, Germany.