2017-18

Oana Marian

Oana's research examines poetic modalities and potentialities in contemporary theological writing (particularly that of the American theologian Willie James Jennings), and theological dimensions of poetry and poets working, consciously or unconsciously, to rehabilitate diseased and distorted understandings of intimacy within what Jennings calls 'Christianity’s social performances.'

The nature of the distortion is racial and gendered, a diseased understanding of self and other, including understandings of self and land, self and animals, and self and community -- in the language of Martin Buber, 'I-it,' instead of 'I-Thou' ways of relating to the not-me, including a divine not-me that people call God. A basic premise of this research is that, without an understanding of the centrality and necessity of intimacy – and the way intimacy has been distorted – Christian theological projects, even those driven by liberationist impulses, are stuck in an endlessly creative, ultimately futile, episodic repositioning.