Ashley M Gay
Scholar of Theology, Philosophy and Literature
MY RESEARCH
Dissertation
God's Absence is Not Nothing:
Thinking the Ab-solute Otherwise
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As a Protestant theologian, I resume the perennial question of God’s alerity as it pertains to the limitations of human thought and the corruptibility of human institutions. In conversation with Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Weil, Levinas, Tillich, and Lacoste, I note how these limitations—though never saved from corruptibility—are not the impossibility of a relation to God. Neither is God’s absence (whether conceived as hiddenness, transcendence, alterity, or absoluteness) the refusal of an encounter. To the contrary, God’s absence occasions: (1) responsiveness to what absolves itself from thought; and (2) responsibility, as thinking comes to resemble kenotic love.
Thesis
Saturated With Shadows:
Taking Space, Leaving Room
"Plato’s analogies are not flat diagrams in which one image (for example, gardens) is superimposed on another (the written word) in exact correspondence. An analogy is constructed in three-dimensional space. Its images float one upon the other without convergence: there is something in between, something paradoxical: Eros."
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
Here's a preview of the opening...
Recently Published
Being (a) Home in Christ
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My sermon at the Brookline Church of Christ (May 2011) has been recently published in Finding Their Voices: Sermons by Women in the Churches of Christ, ed. D'Esta Love (ACU Press, 2015).