Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
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In traditional presentations of philosophical theology one normally seeks to avoid speaking from a particular and personal location. This detached, abstract, pseudo-objective “voice from nowhere” is sadly all too common in discourses from theology to science.30 However, one of the noted salient features of pluralistic theology is the rootedness of the pluralistic theologian/bricoleur in her or his context, history, and particularities. Moreover, the theologian/bricoleur must meet their responsibility to speak authentically from their location while producing as beautiful a recombination as they can. In this spirit, then, while avoiding self-indulgent autobiography in favor of autopoesis, I propose to respond to some key issues from the perspective of my own history and social location: that is, a first-generation immigrant, born in East Africa to Indian parents, having grown up in a (somewhat) multicultural context in Canada. Like many others, my perspective is that of a multiply hybrid person (or “intersectional” hybrid, in today’s parlance). Culturally, religiously, socially, politically … I find myself in between many overlapping and interwoven identities, and it is from this hybrid, interstitial position that I argue for a more pluralistic theology. I hasten to add that, by indicating my hybridity, in no way do I want to suggest that somehow my responses to any issues concerning pluralistic theology are dependent on my own unique experience. In many ways I share my social location and my immigrant story with countless others, and pluralistic theology does not rely on any particular history nor require a certain kind of perspective. Rather, in locating myself, I seek to disclose (at least partially) my own biases, presuppositions, and commitments, as well as to specify these responses in the belief that, ironically, the universal resides in the particular. As literature shows us, the story of one is often the story of many.