Theopoetics

In researching for a poetry project I've been working on, I happened this morning on the interesting work of the theopoetic movement. I'll let them tell you more about it:

Madeleine L'Engle: … I sometimes think God is a shit-and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a shit.

Melinda Henneberger: So… to you, faith is not a comfort?

ML: Good heavens, no. It's a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn't an accident.

MH: Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.

ML: Then they're not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

--Newsweek, May 7, 2006

Theopoetics offers us another path, another tool to help us deepen our faith and challenge passivity and oppression toward a deeper becoming. And unlike the proof and comfort of assurance that the tools of religiosity can seem to provide, theopoetics replaces certainty with Beauty and sureness with Art. It lets us open old drawers and crates, unpack grandmother's theology, great-grandfather's books, and read them in the light, their dust swept aside by the movement of the breath: Spirit.

For all that it offers, theopoetics is not a readily found idea, and as such, has not garnered as much attention as perhaps it might be due. In fact, without access to a specialized library, much of the information pertaining to it, and certainly direct access to its literature, is not available. Should one begin their search online, the smatterings of reference to it are few and far between.

A handful of articles and texts are repeatedly found, and yet they are just a few facets of the jewel.Consequently, after I had begun to look around for theopoetics materials, and found them to be relatively rare and far flung, I came to believe that there should be a means of corralling the available information so that it was more accessible to those seeking. After some months I decided to move on the idea and make a site (even if an asynchronous, non-spatial one) from which people could begin to explore. From that point forward, working, reading, and exploring for the site has only made me more certain that there needs to be more work, reading, and exploration.

I believe that the site can become the digital nexus for what I imagine will become an increasingly covered and interesting topic. While I am unabashedly Quaker, it is not. Though my selections are undoubtedly influenced by my Membership in the Religious Society of Friends, I intend for this little corner of the web to be useful to a broad range of spiritual and poetic thinkers; my desire is that it serve as a crossroads for all those interested in the field, process, and potential of this Art as theology. I would like it to become a ready reference for all things theopoetic. For students and teachers and for all of us that read, aware of the Breath.

While what I present here is not complete, I believe it covers most of the major work and workers to date. I will continue to update content substantially in the following months: in the future I plan for, there will be more names, texts, details and conferences to add. To that end, if there are desires for additional information to be included here, or clarifications/corrections, I hope to learn of them and will do my best to accommodate. The only thing I ask is that you send me an email if you find this site useful and/or interesting. Contact from others helps to lubricate the gears.

http://theopoetics.net

There's also a really interesting article co-authored by process philosopher Catherine Keller here.