What Systematic theologians call “election”—in Barth’s version, God’s divine self-determination to be God with and for the human being—Liberation theologians call God’s “opción” for the marginalized—in political as much as epistemological commitment (After Method, 111).

———

Wow. Why didn’t somebody tell me that 30 years ago? If I had read Hanna Reichel’s book in graduate school, my life might have been different. I too read both systematic theology and constructive theology. Some of the constructive theology was assigned for class. Some of it, the gay and lesbian stuff, I read on my own. But I read my gay and lesbian theology in the closet. Not entirely. I was out to my graduate student colleagues and some of my teachers. I helped John Boswell organize a gay and lesbian studies conference. I think that’s what we called it then. But with one exception—a paper on Jonathan as a model of how a rich heir to the throne might ally himself with the poor by the side of David—I never mixed the two. Nor did I admit to myself what the two might offer one to the other.

Instead, I tried to stand above them. Which makes it hard to stand with them. By my second book, Sexuality and the Christian Body, my attitude was, a pox on both houses. Conservative, anti-gay systematic theology of Protestant and Catholic varieties, I wrote in 1999, was sophisticated but wrong. Liberal, pro-gay constructive theology, I wrote at the same time, was shallow but just. The word “queer” was hardly used in academic writing of the time, and I rejected the title Queer Theology suggested by a reader for Blackwell because it would make it harder to get tenure.

I wrote Sexuality and the Christian Body—an early case for same-sex marriage—entirely in the genre of systematic theology because that was the game, and even though its motivation was queer. But I didn’t appreciate—I didn’t thank—my predecessors in queer theology. That was a failure to see grace and show gratitude. I was proud that I could make systematic theological arguments—good ones!—to the same conclusions. And I still am. I received the best review that I hope ever to receive. I think that the book’s rhetoric succeeded. And its substance proved half of Reichel’s case—that nothing prohibits systematic theology from reaching the truths of constructive theology. Nihil obstat!

But what if I had read Hanna Reichel first? I did believe, even then, that the same God made gay people and systematic theologians. I did know, even then, that the same God sometimes made the same people gay and systematic theologians. I was one of them, and I even came to understand it as a vocation. But I never allowed the two sides to come into full conversation. It was safer to stand above than alongside. Superiority was safer than solidarity. I even anthologized an article on “The Appeal to Experience” in which George Schner archly dropped a footnote to remark that “it could be fascinating to read the sed contra of the quaestio, as used by Aquinas for example, as prefaced by the phrase, ‘however, in my experience, . . .'”

So I have been overjoyed to read this book. It’s rare that I read a book cover to cover these days. But this time I regularly read past the daily ration I had assigned myself, or picked up Reichel again in the periods I had set aside to read for fun. The first thing I wrote about the book was an email asking Reichel for permission to use the summary of Althaus-Reid in class. When I read that “[t]he Constructive theological diagnosis of Systematic Theology’s complicity in structural violence and oppression might be taken as midwifing the birth of theological consciousness regarding not simply its finitude but its entanglement in the sin that affects all of human existence” (67), I was treated to a visitation. I saw the ghost of Eberhard Jüngel—tall and stately like a crane—nodding his long neck in agreement.

I have been amazed and humbled by the book’s bravery—its ability to stand with two camps, or to follow Christ outside the gate, and by its generosity, its ability to give thanks where thanks is due. It solves a problem that a lot of us have wanted to solve, or have wished would go away, without quite knowing how, and even when some of the best practitioners of both systematic and constructive theology have assured us the problem didn’t need solving—the problem that we could not represent the One God, Who is the truth and loves justice at once, in a unified theology that kept those things together. Underlying the preoccupation with the light-hearted, unsystematic, and ad hoc use of method, therefore, is a deep and formidable conviction about the oneness of God, who cannot be well represented in fragments that claim to represent the whole—even when creatures can represent God only in fragments.

That’s why Reichel’s book might well have been undergirded or capped with a doctrine of God made explicit. As it stands, the book practices something like an ad hoc method of correlating systematic and constructive theology—which is better than a systematic method. If you believe, perhaps unfairly, that constructive theology is “infected” with secular culture, the correlation could even sound like Tillich’s (in a bad sense). But it’s not like Tillich if you assume that the one God has always already been shaping the apparently “secular” formations that “form” the context of the contextual theologies. Then you get a Christology like that of Maximus in which all the logoi are seeking always and in all things to embody the Logos. The advantage of Maximus is that 21st century theologians can make the logoi as organic, surprising, fragmentary, and various as they like. And yet the logoi still need each other—”their limitations are meant for their good,” and the logoi are still defined by the presence of all the others (because much in Maximus resists and even undoes the formal teleologies that he persists in). A further advantage of “logos” is that it comprehends both “account,” as logical as systematicians might desire, and “story,” as experiential as you might find in the lives of saints or the biographies of queer Christians.

But another part of its charm is that the book proposes a solution that is not grand, global, or totalizing, but (to use words other than the author’s) local, pragmatic, ad hoc—and far removed from a doctrine of God. Rather than referring to the language of the Princeton University Religion Department (“pragmatic”) or of the late 20th C. Yale school (“ad hoc”), and still less to a doctrine of God, Reichel turns to a new and unexpected interlocutor, unencumbered by past theological politics: design theory. That field prizes small, even minimal changes that bring better fit and prioritize the needs of users—changes that are in practice hard to object to, that charm the eye and fit the hand so well that they almost seem to disappear. Design theory does some of the work similar interventions would leave to Judith Butler. Butler makes space by proclaiming that the options are not exhausted by the alternative of repristinating the usage of a term or banishing it altogether: a third option remains, to continue to use it, to subvert it, to remove it from constellations of oppression. Butler’s move is Hegelian: Butler announces a dichotomy and then transcends it. Design theory gains an advantage in positing no dichotomy to overcome, and that in intervening too modestly to seem subversive: they may subvert, but they may also succeed all the better by going unnoticed. They may go without saying. Perhaps by turning to design theory Reichel will accomplish a unification in the doctrine of God without starting an argument. Wisdom, Aquinas says—and maybe it isn’t true, but he says it over and over—does all things suaviter, sweetly, gently, courteously.

After dispensing with positive, negative, and dialectical methods, Reichel opens the constructive part of the book with a concept of “queer holiness.” It appears when reality intervenes to burst our categories:

“Reality leaves a trace, which Barth might call ‘craters’ and which Althaus-Reid might call queerness. The determinate form of our epistemological failures and limitations affords positive insights. A similar intuition is at work in basic hermeneutic guidelines such as the ‘difference criterion’ in historical-critical exegesis. To distinguish between authentic and inauthentic elements, scholars concluded that whatever elements of Jesus’ discourse and practice were irreducible to and inexplicable from his own or the Gospel writers’ social, intellectual, and religious context were most likely authentic since there was no rationale to make them up. But it successfully leveraged the insight hermeneutically that what does not fit into our categories, what exceeds our economies of reason, what cannot be integrated into a system, points to truth.” (115, text and footnote 27)

That exposition was notably abstract. How about some examples of queer holiness? It would be easy to point to Althaus-Reid for examples. But they don’t accomplish the cross-fertilization or the hybrid vigor that Reichel seems to be proposing. Could we perhaps commission Reichel to compile a book of hours, a calendar of queer saints, a menologion? Robert Neville once preached an (unfortunately unpublished) sermon on the book of Hosea in which he shows quite convincingly that we’ve all been reading it wrong. God, he points out, is almost entirely on the side of Gomer, teaching Hosea to pay attention to wild, unbridled love. Symeon the New Theologian once preached a parable to his monks in which God, depicted as male, receives a penitent rebel, depicted as male, and in a mash-up of the Prodigal Son and Ruth’s seduction of Boaz, welcomes him into his bedchamber and “places his face on all his members.” What about Barth’s queer household? Was there anything holy about it? (Did Nelly ever think so?) Could we have some close readings of such figures? If not from Reichel, then perhaps from dissertation writers?

In fact, there is a bit of a cipher of a category that Reichel invokes from time to time. Imagine the voice of a child, asking for the definition of a new word. Mommy, what is “reality”? There is that which escapes our categories; there is that which calls forth more language; can we hear more about it? Thomas Aquinas, in one of his more surprising moments, and without conceding much more content, seems to anticipate social construction precisely as he is trying to articulate his realism. The thing, he says, is constituted between two intellects (res ipsa inter duos intellectus constituta est)—the understanding of human beings and the understanding of God. So this is a plea for more—or for why more is exactly what we can’t have.

Or perhaps these realities are a practice. Because unlike Aquinas’s definition, Reichel uses the plural “realities” to mean things that might demand justice: “any attempt of doing justice to these realities (whatever that may mean) can only be achieved by breaking with method rather than by following it, and that such bold procedure can never be justified in advance, only rationalized in hindsight in light of its insights” (19). They then proceed to give us rather more about the practice than about the ontology:

“The Epistle to the Hebrews” discusses at length the possibility for Christians to enter into a “place of rest,” only to conclude by prompting us to follow Jesus outside. Going “outside the gates” with Christ is thus not just to risk but to actively sacrifice the legibility, recognition, and justification that come with belonging to a “camp” (153, 156).

We encounter the world around us as full of opportunities. This insight lies at the heart of the “theory of affordances” put forward by James Gibson (1904–79). Perception is not simply about gauging properties: size, color, shape, and so on. We apprehend things as already bearing a sense of how they might enter usefully into our lives: with a sense of the possibilities they afford us. We perceive a chair as affording the possibility of sitting. A bird perceives a twig with an affordance for sitting; a beaver perceives the same twig not as offering a perch, but something to be eaten.

Gibson wrote about affordances in the 1970s, with an eye to the philosophy of perception. Since then, affordances have been taken up in the theory of design, framing questions about what products offer their users: what they afford. Are their affordances intuitive, for instance? A well-designed door handle invites opening without further thought; a poorly designed handle makes things complicated. We can also think about how an affordance is offered to some people and not to others, perhaps on account of physical impairment. Also fascinating are unforeseen affordances, with objects put to use in creative or subversive ways, unimagined by their makers.

Working from a wide and thorough knowledge of this literature, Hanna Reichel’s After Method is, to my knowledge, the most substantial theological engagement with the theory of affordances to date. Here interest lies in what theologies afford—how doctrines are liable to be used—with the emphasis squarely on harm. With the theory of design in mind, they also ask whether theology offers affordances intuitively (here more positive ones), who might be excluded, and how doctrines have been used creatively and subversively, offering unforeseen uses.

Reichel’s fascination with the literature on affordances, and the theory of design, is one provocation for their book, as is a searching exploration of their vocation as a theologian: especially as a theologian with one foot in systematic theology and the other in constructive or activist theology (worlds principally represented here by Karl Barth and Marcella Althaus-Reid). Even more concretely, they jump off from a striking vignette of reticence toward doctrine among students in their introductory systematics class at Princeton Theological Seminary, reticence born of the assumption that theology is a cause of harm, a baneful influence, something—approached in the terms of this book—with many affordances for ill.

In response to this ground-breaking book, many another book might be written in turn. Here, I will focus on Reichel’s decision to concentrate on theology’s affordances for harm. This is a deeply critical book: critical because of the company it keeps (neither Barth nor Althaus-Reid are thinkers of the status quo), critical in its grounding in contemporary theory, and critical in its morally astringent concern for human well-being. That represents some of the book’s principal strengths, yet it also left me thinking of another perspective, that deserves to be placed alongside it: the good done with theology. I start with the idea not that the criticism goes too far, as that it might not be applied quite extensively enough. The book takes flight from Reichel’s students’ assumption that theology is harmful. It surely can be, but—without being dismissive—constructive criticism might be extended even to that conviction, which is likely both correct and incorrect, informed and misinformed.

I make no suggestion that specific accounts of theologically grounded harm, to an individual or community, should be taken anything other than entirely seriously. Such experiences will lie behind some of their student frostiness to doctrine, with a force that we should not gainsay. In wishing to expand the bounds of criticism, I have less specific accusations against theology in mind, indeed sometimes inchoate ones, perhaps taken simply for granted. I will take the case of environmental degradation, since I have some familiarity with that literature. At least since the time of Lynn White Jr.’s influential 1967 paper in Science, the accusation has been made—or simply assumed—that theology, and especially Christian theology, lies behind the despoliation of nature: that theology, and especially Christian theology, has set humanity apart from the rest of creation, with the imago Dei as license to subjugate other creatures to human interests (narrowly conceived in a short-term economic fashion). This claim deserves consideration—it is not without insights—but considerable, well-deserved objections have been raised. For instance, it is a commonplace to say that Christianity, especially in its more Platonist forms, has been a world-denying influence. Yet (as I have argued with Jacob Sherman), a claim has been made that Christianity’s Platonism has been one of divine descent into the world, not of human escape from it, which would therefore see the rest of nature a place of immense value, the arena for divine beauty, goodness, and life to be manifest.

What can be said of widely accepted but flawed (or at least incomplete) environmental accusations against theology could, I expect, be mirrored for other culturally prevalent accusations, when born of scant study of the texts or the history of doctrine. I am emphatically not seeking to disregard stories of specific individual and communal harms, only suggesting that alongside the important response to accusations against theology offered in After Method—with its question “How can we do better?”—stands another response to student worries about theology, asking whether claimed genealogies of harm, leading back to doctrine, can always bear the weight laid upon them.

Theology has a mixed history as to its effects and uses. Theology has been used to subjugate women; it has also, slowly, taught us that men and women bear the image of God equally. Theology was used to deprive indigenous populations; it was also the basis for the recognition of universal and inalienable rights. Theology was deployed in justification of slavery; when humanity finally turned to outlaw slavery, the inspiration was a theological one. Doctrine has also been the inspiration for provision of healthcare and education, defense of the rule of law, and a politics centered on the common good. The blessings do not take away the ills, but neither are the ills the whole story. I think of the Romans scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: what has Christian theology even done for us?

Nor even are affordances the whole story. Theology can be used to do good and to do evil, but it is not only a means; it also shapes our sense of the ends for which we might use anything. Reichel’s emphasis is on the former (the uses of theology), and fascinatingly so, but the theological shaping of our ends is also important. Aware of sin, as Reichel certainly is, we worry properly about selfish and hurtful use, not least of doctrine. One response is to seek expressions of theology that are less liable to be used that way; another is to seek theological reconfiguration of our vision and desires: what we are out to use anything for in the first place.

Following Reichel’s lead, however, and keeping the harmful affordances of theology primarily in mind, we might ask where this “theology,” put to such uses, is primarily located: in what register, and literally in what location—in academic monographs, confessions of faith, catechisms, textbooks, blog posts, sermons? Given that Reichel bridges between church writing (Barth) and constructive or activist theology (Althaus-Reid), the theology under consideration seems primarily to lie at the former pole. The world that needs to step up and take the affordances of what it produces seriously is that of Barth, with theology that is both academic and ecclesial: the realm, we might say, of dogmatics.

However, does responsibility of the harms of theology really lie with dogmatics, or with its popular mediations: with the Kirchliche Dogmatik and Summa Theologiae, or with the textbooks, sermons, and blog posts mentioned above? Does the problem lie with doctrine, or at further remove, with how it is taught and popularized? Is the problem what is done with doctrine, or is it what is done with what is done with doctrine?

Take the doctrine of creation “out of nothing.” This, it has been claimed, presents a vision of God as domineering, which validates oppressive relations between human beings. When we dig into the textual detail of what has been written about creation out of nothing, however, we find it, instead, to be the basis for a non-competitive view of the relation between creatures and creator (as explored, for instance, by Janet Soskice and Kathryn Tanner). That example is not an outlier. Much that is claimed about the meaning and repercussions of doctrine is discussed in an intellectual context lacking any great familiarity with the detail of doctrinal writing. The attitude of theology toward natural science stands as another example. Is the problem, then, with doctrine, or with misunderstandings of doctrine, or ignorance of doctrine?

Today, even in many churches (never mind the wider academy and culture), attitudes to doctrine often lie somewhere between contempt and indifference. Whatever harms (or benefits) are therefore being done by Christians in the name of Christianity are more likely carried out in ignorance of doctrine than on account of it. I find it more convincing to say—alas—that divine simplicity, or the communicatio idiomatum, or the prevenience of grace is orthogonal to Christian practice, rather than setting the running, for good or ill.

Reichel has a response to any too-hasty defense of theology on grounds of mediation, precisely because affordances allow us to trace responsibility back. Theologians should consider what their theology might be used to do down the line, including how it might be communicated. That makes this an important and bracing book, but this line can only be pushed so far. Theologians should write clearly, and Reichel helpfully urges them to think about how their theology might be put to work in ways that are not compatible with the convictions they wish to express. That said, no theologian is omniscient, and every finite thing has unfathomable depths, and offers untold affordances. Much of that is beyond our control. Theologians have responsibilities, but only for what we might call “due diligence.”

Reichel’s book offers a powerful discussion of how theology is used, and an equally powerful provocation to think about what theology is for. One response to After Method—a dismissive one—might say that theology is only in a secondary sense about practical consequences for individuals and communities, being primarily about salvation and knowledge of the truth. I would not endorse that dismissal. Even accepting that doctrine is first for the sake of truth and eternal life (as I do), any moral and metaphysical realist (as I am by virtue of my Thomism) would want to see coherence between the various ends and tasks of theology. Even if theology—let us paint this boldly—is primarily about salvation from damnation and attaining the beatific vision, and only secondarily about human flourishing in this life, it is nonetheless also about the latter, and would be poorly formed if its primary and secondary aims and effects did not align. We can therefore judge the theological tree by its mundane fruits, as well as its eternal ones.

Questions about the purpose of theology also help us to address the matter of theology’s imperfection. There is a strong, deeply Protestant sense in After Method of theology as a failure. Human knowledge and creativity in thought are compared to God’s knowledge and creativity, and found utterly wanting. The imperfect is the enemy of the perfect.

That is a recognizable Christian view, but it is not the only way to think about theology as a human activity. What if theology was not meant to be—could never be—comparable with divine knowledge, rendering that comparison invalid? What if its role is only ever to be a finite reflection, God’s accommodation of divine truth to creaturely ways of thinking and being? I would rather rejoice in what theology can be than lament what never could. As Aristotle put it, a slight knowledge of the highest things is of greater worth than extensive knowledge of that which is lower. Reichel wants “better theology” but warns that “better” never means “good.” While recognizing that theology can be flawed, I think that it is positively good that we can confess God as three Persons in one substance, creation as ex nihilo, and Christ as fully human and fully divine. I think those statements are true: finite, human, and creaturely in mode, but true, according to our human measure.

Even if we were to grant that theology cannot be “good,” could it be “good enough”? Reichel mentions the idea of “good enough theology.” That offers opportunities—affordances—beyond its current role in the book. For one thing, it helpfully recalls Donald Winnicott’s idea of “good enough parenting” (perhaps Reichel’s intention, perhaps not). Being a parent is difficult, and all the more when parents hold themselves to an unattainable standard. Winnicott was an expert on the ill-effects of maladjusted infant development; nonetheless he held out the generous idea of “good enough parenting”: that despite all the terrible trajectories that childhood can take, most of the time parents do a “good enough” job, and that is all that is needed.

It is a long distance from the new-born babe to the five-year-old child in terms of personality and emotional growth. This distance cannot be covered except by the provision of certain conditions. These conditions need only be good enough, since a child’s intelligence becomes increasingly able to allow for failures and to deal with frustrations by advance preparation.

Most of the time, with good enough parenting, the child develops a sense of self and agency, and confidence in the world as a basically trustworthy place. Winnicott offered a humane vision: in parenting, it is not helpful to hold people, or oneself, to a standard that cannot be achieved. Even with something as important as a child’s development, the full weight cannot rest entirely on her parent’s shoulders. Other forces are in play, not least the growing selfhood and agency of the child.

There would be something unbecoming about a systematic theologian using the idea of “good enough theology,” after the model of “good enough parenting,” as a “get out of jail free” card in face of harm done by theological means—in face of the ill that theology has afforded—but taking a humane perspective is not without merit. Reichel’s challenges in After Method are of the first importance, but I wonder whether demanding ethical vision takes sufficient account of the ways in which much that is downstream of our actions lies beyond our control, such that the liability of the theologian cannot be absolute. Being a good enough parent involves love, and avoidance of the worst dangers; so with theology. We should be diligent, but we cannot make what we produce entirely incapable of harmful use. Theology must be good enough (and I would even go so far as to say that it can be good).

After Method will help its deservedly many readers to think about the purpose and uses of theology. As in my case, it may send them down avenues the author would not have expected. That only goes to show that the objects we design have unforeseen affordances.

“Usability is not simply a property of something,” writes Sara Ahmed. Usability is found in the relationship between a thing and the user. And so as design theory relates to the use of objects and environments, it asks: is the encounter between the user and the designed object one of harmony, where the design clearly affords its proper function or use? The term “affordance” is used to describe that relationship, “to emphasize the relational nature of useability.” Affordances “reside neither in the environment nor in the body but in the inherent coupling of the two.” But design can also result in a disaffordance when the design confuses the user as to its proper use or does not work with the body of the user engaging it. The focus is on the relationship not the object in isolation of the relation, not design for the sake of design, but in fact, at least according to some design theory, at the heart of this approach is a commitment to “the deference of the object to the person.”

Inspired by discussions in design theory, Reichel considers the usability of doctrine and focuses their theological lens on the point of contact between the doctrine produced by the method and the user, that is the one engaging the theological text or idea. Reichel neither endorses a specific method, nor develops a new method of their own, but instead attends to the encounter between doctrine and embodied persons. In so doing Reichel outlines an approach to theological method in an ongoing movement of redesign based on feedback from the user, and open to redesign by the user themselves.

Reichel demonstrates how doctrine can offer affordances and disaffordances depending on the lived reality of the person engaging it. They encourage us to think about theology in terms of design: how does the work we produce meet the embodied, lived reality of the one who encounters it? Does it offer the person an affordance, does it produce the intended result or use? Does it offer life and gospel to the one whom it addresses? Or does it produce a disaffordance? The designer/theologian is called to observe who is misfitted by the shape of a doctrine, and who or what systems it fits harmoniously. There is reason for concern when a doctrine seems to offer affordance to systems that oppress, squelch flourishing, or support isolationist divisions. If a system finds the design of a doctrine fit for use in oppressive, death-dealing ways, then we must go back to the drawing boards, we must question the design and shape of the doctrine itself. One could surely write a beautiful theological treatise that, when encountered by people of certain bodies or lived experiences, offers nothing beautiful at all, but instead extends harm or the isolation that can be a result of “misfitting.” Or as Reichel says, “The doctrine meets bodies and experiences whom, it turns out, it was not designed to accommodate, and whom it thus ‘misfits.'” Using work in disability studies, Reichel identifies the way design itself makes a person a “misfit.” So too the form doctrine is given may have the (un)intended result of making certain people misfits in relation to that theology.

“Misfitting” is drawn from the work of leading scholar in disability studies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who explains the terms “fitting” and “misfitting” denote “an encounter in which two things come together either in harmony or in disjunction.” She describes fitting as involving “a ‘proper’ or ‘suitable’ relationship with an environment so as to be ‘well adapted,’ ‘in harmony with,’ or ‘satisfy[ing] the requirements of’ the situation.” In contrast misfitting is exemplified by the cliché “a square peg in a round hole.”

Appreciative of Reichel’s attention to theology’s affordances, I want to explore further the ways disability theory and experience might provide even more insight into how design and affordance can work for the theological task. As Reichel echoes Ahmed: “those who are not quite at home—in a body, a discipline, a world—have much to teach us about how things are built.” These perspectives are certainly not absent from Reichel’s book; I simply want to give attention specifically to how disability affordances may enlighten for us the ways people encounter and redesign theologies in ways vastly different from the original designer’s intent. I will consider two possible responses to a disaffordance: 1) a reactive adaptation, what Arseli Dokumaci calls “activist affordances”: the creative performances of people with disabilities to make objects and environments work for them in some way when the original design fails them. And 2) a refusal in the face of a disaffordance to creatively engage it at all, as an alternative activist response. I believe the first response “fits” with Reichel’s proposal but wonder when a refusal is the right response to a theological disaffordance.

In Staring, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson discusses how some people who use prosthetic hands may choose a less functioning cosmetic hand in public spaces to lessen the discomfort of strangers encountering the person. Some choose to wear the cosmetic hand in flesh tones instead of their mechanical hand to spare “viewers the discomfort of being starers.” She explains, “What is best for starers is not always what is best for starees.” The recipients of stares make decisions that protect viewers from the stigma of staring, and likewise shield themselves somewhat from being stigmatized by stares. Sunaura Taylor tells a similar story, describing how she navigates interactions at the coffee shop counter. She could take the coffee to her table using her mouth, but because of the normalizing standards of our movements this creates greater discomfort for the others in that space than does her asking the employee to carry it to the table for her. It seems particularly hard for people to deal with their discomfort when she does things with body parts that aren’t necessarily what people assume those parts are meant for. So, she must make the decision to either do what she can—carry her coffee herself but create discomfort for the starer, or she can ask for assistance she may not necessarily need but that does spare the other patrons some discomfort. These are decisions on how to navigate spaces where standards of normative body movement and use are scrutinized and punished with stigma and stares if they deviate.

The question of norms clearly relates to the theological task, and Reichel engages the debates around normativity and antinormativity primarily through queer theory. Some bodies will better be able to accommodate norms than others: the space and discipline were created to accommodate them; the canon affords them wide and comfortable use. Does one work within particular norms to appease as best as possible the expectations of church/academy, or does one boldly make use of the text or idea in the way that best functions for your flourishing, for yours and your community’s relationships with self, others, and God? The choice must be made to accommodate as much as possible the established norms or accept the stigma and stares (rejection and isolation) likely to result from movement outside them.

Taylor’s response is either to visibly reject the expectations of normative body movement and use, or to use the body of another, demonstrating our interdependence. Either option Taylor chooses in the coffee shop could be considered an “activist affordance,” according to the definition developed by critical disability theorist Arseli Dokumaci, who researches the manners in which people with disabilities make ways, or make do, that demonstrate ingenuity and creative performance. She explains: “The difference between a critical design framework and my framework is that activist affordances are not created in design studios or makers’ labs with specialized tools and materials. Instead, they are choreographed in our everyday lives, in and through our bodies, and with whatever we find around us.”

People with disabilities create multitudes of alternative methods to accomplish tasks, develop skills, and play, that fly in the face of normative standards of body movement and use. Dokumaci coins the term “activist affordances” for these encounters and uses “as a way to understand how disabled people literally make up whatever affordances fail to readily materialize in their environments (or otherwise be immediately available for perception) and at the same time must make up for that failure.” Dokumaci finds activist affordance in the unexpected, non-normative, use of body parts, objects, or others by people with disabilities. An activist affordance could be the way someone with one hand uses her rib cage to “supply the gripping capacity needed to operate a manual can opener,” or the way Maya Meri’s father fashioned legs for her out of plastic tubes, fabric, and tuna cans when they lived in a camp for Syrian refugees in Turkey. The makeshift legs allowed Maya to walk to school and move about the camp with her friends. Dokumaci also highlights the ways another person’s body can be used as an activist affordance. One such example is given by a man with rheumatoid arthritis who was unable to navigate the rugged roads to walk to school alone as a child, so his father carried him in his arms the whole way to school and came back and carried him home at the end of each day.

Specifically, activist affordances are created in the failure of the environment to actually offer the affordance. Dokumaci explains, “activist affordances can emerge only in the face of constraints, failures, and losses.” But further these actions are not only to make do and get by, they point to something more. Activist affordances are a hopeful projection of a better future. Dokumaci writes, “we can think of activist affordances as a mode of designing that emerges from the constraints of the AS IS and moves toward ‘What if?,’ bringing possible futures to life.” They are “worlds-in-the-making” to accessible futures, and point to something better, what Garland-Thomson might call a “better fit.” These are examples of a mode of design Reichel illuminates in their book. When theology fails to offer the affordance promised, the one misfitted redesigns, repurposes, makes do with the resources at hand to create an affordance of their own. They shape and form the doctrine to better fit. This is Reichel’s charge to theological designers, and they provide examples of users who become designers and remake the doctrine to better fit.

Reichel notes that Dolores Williams brought to light the potential harm done to the lives of Black women through substitutionary theories of atonement, which don’t afford them “the promised functionality of love, comfort, . . . [and an] end to vicarious suffering,” but instead extends a burden of glorified suffering and self-sacrifice. The encounter between Black women and this doctrine is one of disaffordance, and thus Black women have created designs of their own that interpret the cross and salvation in ways that fit. Reichel likewise points to Valerie Saiving’s critique of the doctrine of sin as another example of disaffordance. Sin as pride and self-assertion didn’t name the sin of most women’s lives, and such a definition potentially trapped women in a cycle of self-abnegation that kept them from fulfilling the lives that could have been afforded them with a different telling of sin and salvation that recognizes the sin of self-denial in their lives. Perhaps these are activist affordances, taking the object at hand and using it in ways the original designer may have never intended, having never envisioned what an encounter between that doctrine and that life experience may produce.

This is the creative redesign possible when we consider the affordance of doctrine, when we turn our attention to the point of contact and relationship between that epistemological landscape and the bodies seeking to use it. But there is another response to a disaffordance: refusal. And I wonder when this is the right theological response—not a redesign but a refusal to expend energy in redesign when the original design fails one’s body or experience, or if theology’s users can act out the misfitting, demonstrating the lack of fit in the standardized normative mode of the discourse.

Sometimes disability activists very intentionally demonstrate their misfitting an environment, for example throwing themselves out of their wheelchairs and crawling up the steps of the Capitol in protest. Nancy Eiesland tells the story of Diane DeVries who was born without arms or legs, and from an early age rejected the “prosthetic devices intended to ‘normalize’ her appearance and limb function.” DeVries found the devices more a hindrance than a help; they slowed her down, made the completing of tasks more laborious, when she could do certain things just fine using her mouth. She preferred to walk around the house on her hip bones as legs rather than the prosthetic devices designed for her. Congenitally armless professor and lawyer, Dr. Theresia Degener refuses to use prosthetic arms to normalize her appearance. She uses her body as best serves her, and “delivers lectures or press conferences while holding a microphone with one foot and making rhetorical gestures with the other.” Creating a fit, or working to perform normativity, can in some situations offer the benefit of “material and visual anonymity”—it can reduce the experience of stigma, but there is also a cost in that it can allow for “complacency to social justice and a desensitizing to material experience.” Thus, the performance of the misfit, though costing the stare or stigma, “can exceed the experiences of oppression and subordination and lead to a demand for and recognition of better fits.” This preference for the affordance of one’s own body and a rejection of standards of normalized body movement or appearance may have something to teach the theological designer as well. I wonder if there is room for refusal as a response to disaffordance, whether it can play a role in the feedback loop Reichel calls for in After Method.

Howard Thurman told of his grandmother who, when she was enslaved, heard sermon after sermon on “slaves obey your masters in the Lord for this is right.” She determined that if she ever learned to read or was ever free, she wasn’t going to read anything by Paul. Thurman says she would only occasionally allow him to read 1 Corinthians 13 to her, but otherwise she rejected anything written by Paul. This response to a theological text that affords not life and flourishing but death and bondage is not to create an affordance when the design failed. She doesn’t repurpose or creatively re-interpret the passage. She refuses it. This is an intentional decision regarding what one will hear and what one won’t hear, or who one will listen to. In his essay “I Won’t Learn from You,” Herbert Kohl shares the story of a grandfather who refused to learn English, not because he couldn’t learn it, but because he actively resisted learning English so that his family would be forced to speak Spanish, a rebellion against demands for assimilation, and an act of preservation of the language in the family. Kohl notes that “learning what others want you to learn can sometimes destroy you.” And he insists that educators understand the difference between willful refusal to learn and failure to learn. It can be a “refusal to be modeled by a hostile society.”

Though Reichel creatively engages Barth, many feminist theologians over the years have refused Barth and others whose sexism and heteropatriarchy is either sprinkled throughout or deeply embedded in their theologies. These users turned designers refuse to creatively repurpose his work for this reason, and possibly because Barth’s commentators closely monitor the boundaries of what they deem proper deployment of his ideas and respond to perceived infractions with dismissive ridicule or harsh contempt. Such a refusal may protect the would-be user from the harm of misfitting in the Barthian environments, but in what ways can those who misfit perform their misfitting so as to protest the injustice of heterosexism, to draw attention to the design failure, and to shake the complacency of those who fit it so harmoniously?

When asked by her dissertation committee about what method she utilized for her research, Luce Irigaray responded: “A delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice?” While they may not have had Irigaray’s comment in mind, in After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology, Reichel takes seriously the question Irigaray poses back to her dissertation committee, and answers it. The answer is unequivocal: yes, method has indeed led us astray. As Reichel puts it (to cite one of any number of examples): “the redemptive potential of any methodological program is thoroughly called into question” (19). After Method, then, “is an intervention against method on theological grounds” (19). However, Reichel continues, “the recognition that no method may be able to ‘save’ theology does not mean that we cannot do ‘better’ than we are doing at any given time and place,” and the book is “a call for ‘doing better,’ even as we know we will never ‘be good'” (19, 6). “Method cannot save us,” Reichel emphasizes, “but this does not mean that it cannot do anything for us” (127).

Drawing especially on design theory and relevant conversations in queer theory (as well as by their engagement with Karl Barth and Marcella Althaus-Reid as an unlikely pair of theological interlocutors), Reichel thus pursues a kind of both/and approach to doing theology, to doing method after method, all while refusing that as an easy out in any way. This approach, a “material reality check,” is rooted in the queer messiness of grace—a grace that also resists an either-or approach, as Reichel understands grace not as separate from or opposed to the law—which engenders the “queer virtues of excessive faithfulness, messy solidarity, and indecent honesty” (149). It is precisely this rejection of an either-or in favor of a both-and (that is also, perhaps, a kind of neither-nor?) that I want to focus on—contending with some factors that might press up against such a both-and/neither-nor post-method approach, and raising some questions about what it might mean to attend to, perhaps even harness, said factors.

Before that, however, I need to preface (the bulk/body of) my response by acknowledging (admitting?) that I really loved this book. I found it to be wildly refreshing and deeply resonant, simultaneously challenging and affirming. As someone who has long been interested in, invested in rethinking, and quite critical of a wide range of trends in theological method, reading After Method felt akin to, I don’t know, finally finding a new sport or hobby that you’re really into after months or even years of searching; or, perhaps more apt, having moved as an adult, finding great new friends after feeling isolated for a long time. The feeling I’m trying to capture here is that feeling of simultaneous excitement and relief that comes with a sense of fit or belonging.

Largely due to my deep enjoyment and appreciation of this book, I struggled with writing this response. This weird positive form of a writer’s block meant taking longer than given and expected to write it. My writing was also stalled by a range of significant life events, both wonderful (getting married) and terrible (the death of a good friend), and, of course, the quotidian—a heavy teaching load, saying yes to too many projects and being behind on, well, all of them, the realities of burnout that keep thwarting my work despite my best efforts . . . All to say, I had a lot of feelings about, and while reflecting on, After Method, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, led me to thinking about feelings and affect, and the ways After Method both does, and doesn’t, address and engage with affect(s).

In many ways, After Method certainly hits an affective register, or at least it did for me. Precisely in the both-and/neither-nor it offers, it assuredly resists any kind of easy way out, or even any way out at all. In their ongoing assertions that “method cannot save us” (77, 104, 127, 137), “design will not save theology” (216, 236), and “anti-normativity cannot save us either” (137), to offer just some of many examples, Reichel rejects the narratives of easy redemption that theologians like Shelly Rambo and Karen Bray caution us against. After Method certainly challenges and helps us “theologically rethink . . . narratives of redemption that keep us chained to our misery while promising us we will, through them, be happy and free.”

Moreover, in Reichel’s turn to conceptual design as a resource, they at least implicitly call for an attention to affect. Referencing Elaine Scarry, Reichel highlights how one of the compelling and useful aspects of design as a framework is precisely this, that design “transforms affective sentiments into structures and ‘things’ as self-perpetuating, durable, ‘objectified human compassion'” (227, cf. fn49). This more-implicit turn to affect also manifests, perhaps most notably, as they consider what “practical uses of theology would best reflect and witness to who we claim God to be?” (221, emphasis theirs). Drawing on both theology and design theory, Reichel rejects a dichotomization of law and grace by suggesting instead a posture of witnessing, and from there, queer use.

Such witnessing (and subsequent ongoing redesign), After Method suggests, means attending to those who have been affected. Practicing conceptual design in our theologies, Reichel writes, “demands close communication and iterative feedback loops of exploration and corroboration, trial and error, envisioning, correction, and development, with the actual users of theology—or anyone who would find themselves affected (or excluded) by the way theological structures are built” (250–51). Going on to ground this claim theologically, Reichel asserts that the “need for ongoing conversation and communal reasoning that foregrounds the witness of misfits and outsiders, of the most affected and the excluded, is an ecclesiological and pneumatological necessity” (252).

What I’m curious about is, does attending to those affected, of those excluded and marginalized, necessitate also a close attention to the affects they experience? Reichel calls for epistemological activism—are there potential links and possibilities here with the epistemological turn to affect that affect theorists (some of whom Reichel draws on: Heather Love, Sara Ahmed) consider—particularly to the “negative affects,” and/or what Ahmed refers to as “affect aliens,” those affects that don’t fit the societal scripts about how we should feel, that are entangled with those who are marginalized and excluded, whether by experience or by perception? Does the epistemological solidarity Reichel calls for itself call for a bit more dwelling with (dwelling in?) such affect aliens? Two specific affects/themes/questions stand out for me on this front: negativity and vigilance.

In their rejection of the redemptive possibilities of theological method and with that, their rejection of any kind of either-or (systemic or constructive theology, law or grace, even normativity or antinormativity), Reichel considers Sedgwick’s reparative turn and Ahmed’s queer use as a kind of “third strategy,” a way to “blur the false binary” within our hermeneutical strategies and approaches (201). Reichel’s commitment to a kind of ongoing movement reminded me of and felt notably resonant with Kent Brintnall’s assertion that “queer theology should produce movement, should strive to unsettle . . .” Yet whereas Brintnall roots this ongoing movement in negativity, Reichel is more cautious, and, again, committed to a kind of both-and. While Reichel cedes that in “its persistent, ongoing movement, negativity might be less nihilistic than it acknowledges,” they also assert that “[r]adical negativity is simply another ideality” (101). Following José Esteban Muñoz’s claims that queerness “is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative,” Reichel wants to “cultivate concrete imaginations, always in critical conversation with the realities that will necessarily disappoint our hopes, but that are also contradicted by our utopias in their unquenchable urge to become real,” and thus considers the possibilities of methodological cruising (173).

While I’m not quite as committed to the negative as Brintnall, and if anything, share Reichel’s penchant toward this eschatologically-rooted methodological cruising, this both-and/neither-nor, this queer use, I wonder if there is space to tarry with the negative just a wee bit more, particularly, well, affectively? While Reichel assuredly is critical of and pushes beyond easy optimism or hope epistemologically, After Method nevertheless felt pretty consistently hopeful and positive about the possibilities beyond method. There is something wildly freeing, and thus quite hopeful, about embracing the reality that method cannot save us, that there is no way out, and thus allowing ourselves to be surprised by the glimpses of grace we encounter “in divine queerness and in the queerness . . . in the real lives of real people” (109). But I wonder if there is also just an ever so slight risk of potentially cruel optimism here—not so much in what is there, the proposal on offer or the possibilities of grace, but in what is not there, or less present, the fear or frustration or anxiety about the long moments between glimpses? What might it look like or mean to focus just a little more on the not yet as opposed to emphasizing the both-and of the already-not yet?

My desire for a little more negativity, a little more moodiness in After Method was undeniably spurred by some of my own negativity and moodiness—my frustration with my writer’s block, my own busyness, and my burnout from that busyness . . . which brings me to the second of the affective themes I wanted more engagement with: exhaustion. While method cannot save us—precisely because method cannot save us—Reichel calls for us to take seriously how, and who, our methodological efforts harm. We need better theology because, as they note on the first page of After Method (citing Kevin Garcia), “bad theology kills” (1, cf. fn2). And because our efforts to do better theology will indeed always fail in some way, and because we must take seriously our own context, this is never ending work.

Conceptual design serves, for Reichel, precisely as a helpful framework and tool for assessing, responding to, and seeking to avoid further harm. “Design creates patterns that allow, invite, discourage, or prevent particular uses,” Reichel writes, “uses that make objects accessible or inaccessible, helpful or harmful in particular situations and to particular users” (213). With that in mind, Reichel calls us to be attentive to design, and to be ever vigilant. “In any given environment,” Reichel writes, “better design requires careful observation of what has happened before to understand what will happen next as consequence of even minute design changes. Such exercise of care is both a matter of intellectual acumen and ethical sensitivity” (226, emphasis theirs). When I started thinking about this response and the questions around affect that I wanted to raise, I had framed this question as “how do we do vigilance that is not hypervigilance?” But the more I thought about it, I realized that wasn’t quite right. Reichel’s proposal resists the temptation (if one can call it that?) toward hypervigilance in two notable ways. First is precisely in the recognition that we will indeed fail, that method cannot save us. That is, again, freeing, and buffers against anxiety-fueled hypervigilance. Perhaps even more notably though, is that the methodological cruising and vigilance toward better design that Reichel offers is playful.

While Reichel follows Barth in that, as theologians, we “need to know both the ‘must’ and the ‘cannot,’ and precisely in this way give God the glory,” they push against his retort that “[e]verything else is child’s play in comparison” (75, fn1; 168). “What if,” Reichel asks, “instead of ‘everything else’ being child’s play, that characterization might suit the work of theology, as well?” (168). Reichel turns to “child’s play” as a site of possibility and considers “playing as a queering mode of engagement that promises surprisingly sideways gains” (172). One side question I have on this front is, what might it look like to take this play seriously in our writing? What might it look like not only to be playful in our approaches, but in our writing itself? Might this be an extension of taking conceptual design seriously in theology? I’m thinking here especially of McLuhan’s now classic notion that “the medium is the message,” and wondering, what might that mean for the ways we write and do theology? On the one hand, thinking about what it might look like to take play seriously in the ways we write theology is exciting and refreshing. On the other hand, though, in thinking about those possibilities, the feeling of exhaustion was near-immediate—yet another thing to worry about (like I said, I’m pretty burnt out . . .). Which is to return to my broader point—in addition to play, is there perhaps also room for rest? Is there a way to embrace rest epistemologically? (Perhaps that is what play is/does?) Or, to circle back further, perhaps there is a way to embrace a little more negativity for when, for whatever reason, whether external or internal, we can’t seem to rest?

In her biography of the playwright and choreographer Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, also a playwright (of Oklahoma! fame) and a good friend of Graham’s, reflects briefly on her own negativity surrounding her writers block and just her general dissatisfaction with her work, and recounts a story where, in a Schrafft’s restaurant, over a soda, she sought advice from Graham about how to proceed. Graham responded to de Mille with the following:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

I recalled Graham’s response at various points while reading After Method. I do still want more rest, some freedom to rest. But I’m not sure if that’s something a better theology can give me, given that the quest for better theology is forever ongoing. I’m not sure if I would embrace that rest even if handed it on a silver platter. Likely not. (No theologian is pleased?) While I at times wanted more explicit affective solidarity in (of?) (my own) negativity, what After Method undeniably does offer is a theological recognition, an embrace, of queer divine dissatisfaction, of blessed unrest, that might keep us marching and make us more alive. And for that I’m very grateful.