Fragments from within the pandemic: theological experiments in silence, speech, and dislocated time

ABSTRACT

This article is a methodological experiment in ‘live’ theology. It reflects on the difficulty of creating theological meaning in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on trauma theology, disability theology, and autoethnographic reflections, we explore a particular “double bind” between silence and speech. While hurried speech can foreclose meaning and cause deep damage in the midst of unfolding trauma, theological silence risks concealing existing injustices that have been intensified by COVID-19. As such, we focus on intersections of race, class, poverty, disability, and legal status. Examining the tensions between overwork and inactivity in pandemic time, we consider dislocated time as resistance to hasty solutions, the rush towards resurrection hope, and modes of redemptive productivity. We confront the desires of practical theology to be found useful in times of trauma, and instead point towards theological practices of fragmented speech and remaining in dislocated time.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• silence and speech
• trauma
• crip time
• inequality
• autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Necropolitics is concerned with ‘those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies’, and is a situation in which people are ‘kept alive but in a state of injury’ (Mbembe 2003, 14, 21).

2 As Kelly Brown Douglas traces in her work, white supremacy is premised on framing the social construction of race, of whiteness and Blackness, as ontological differences between Black people and white people in order to maintain the myth of white exceptionalism and thus also power, wealth, and property (2015, 48-90). In the UK, ‘notions of the ontological difference between Whiteness and Blackness continue to underpin how we assess the qualitative importance of the latter in the body politic of the nation’ (Reddie 2020, 82). Sheppard notes that many practical theologians also act as if race was an ontological reality rather than a social inscription (2016, 221). As respectability politics plays a large role in the representation of Black lives in public and theological discourse (Reddie 2020, 82), it is important to question how we, as white authors, represent particular lives named here, and particularly Black people’s suffering.

3 Imogen Tyler notes that thinking about ‘stigma machines’ is to ‘focus on the mechanisms of stigma production, and the instruments through which stigma is impressed upon bodies in order to subjugate them, as stigma is cranked into operation in support of extractive capitalist political economies’ (2020, 260). This moves away from individualistic notions of stigma toward structural understandings of power.

4 Liddiard articulates: ‘ableism can be understood as the material, cultural and political privileging of ability, sanity, rationality, physicality and cognition’, while ‘disablism refers to the resultant oppressive treatment of disabled people. Disablism and ableism are often dual processes: more often than not, they work in conjunction’ (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Cross

Katie Cross is Christ’s College Fellow in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Wren Radford

Wren Radford is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester.

Karen O’Donnell

Karen O’Donnell is Coordinator of the Centre for Contemporary Spirituality at Sarum College.