Opus Dei: Toward the Sacramental Counterpoint of Liturgy and Ethics in a Diasporic Imaginary Público
Suna-Koro, Kristine (2010)
Abstract
Theological method is the mindscape of perceiving and conceiving
God, world,
and human life. It is the crystallization of the patterns and
practices of religious knowing
as well as the axiological structure of culturally and historically
embedded organization
of knowledge and imagination. As such it cannot be detached from
ethical, social, and
political imagination and praxis. This project is a quest for
ethically inflected
methodological envisagements of a non-hegemonic model of
relationality from the
perspectives of constructive sacramental-liturgical theology in
conversation with
postcolonial theory and diaspora discourses. The competitive and
mutually detractive
disengagement between liturgy and ethics is interrogated as a
symptom of the binaristic
epistemological imagination of Western colonial modernity and its
mainstream Christian
theological creativity. Liturgical-sacramental discourses have been
routinely adiaphorized
in dominant Western theology as a matter of methodological
value-coding. Similar
methodological habits influenced the marginalization of ethics in
theological inquiry.
Sacramental discourse, however ambiguously, challenges the
dualistic and relationally
competitive texture of Western modern theological imagination. It
resonates particularly
aptly with certain recent postcolonial critiques of coercive and
non-reciprocal templates
of relationality to foster a shared reflection on the nature of
asymmetrical, yet ethically
invested, configurations of relationality.
The constructive impetus of this project originates from the
exploration of a
postcolonially colored diasporic imaginary. As a diasporic female
Latvian-American
theologian, I reflect on it as a trajectory of methodological
comportment in theological
inquiry. To assess the transformative potential of diasporically
situated
reconceptualizations of the symptomatic divide between liturgy and
ethics as precisely a
methodological conundrum, the deeply ambiguous contributions of
diasporic Russian
Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann and Jewish
Lithuanian-French ethicist
Emmanuel Levinas are surveyed. From within a diasporic imaginary, I
argue that an
ethically inflected theological envisagement of relationality in
the present era of
postcoloniality can be engendered through a conversation between
the Eastern Christian
idea of sacramentally inscribed synergy and the postcolonial
conception of hybridity. To
modulate the dualistic gridlocks, the notion of counterpoint as a
specification of
postcolonial hybridity by Palestinian-American postcolonial
theorist Edward W. Said
emerges as the pivotal constructive figure of an ethically and
sacramentally scored
constellation of relationality.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction 1
Overture 41
Part I
Chapter 1
Interrogating Disengagement:Liturgy and Ethics in the Gridlock of
Parerga 70
1. Liturgy: Whose Work? 78
2. Ethics: Which Ethics? 90
3. Ambiguous Adiaphorization: Liturgy and Ethics as Parerga
96
4. Re-orchestrating the Overpitched Polarity: From Shock and Awe to
Oscillation and Rehearsal of Eucharistic Living 111
Chapter 2
Beyond Revolutions and Reversals: The Postcolonial Nuance 124
1. The Ominous "Post": Which Postcolonial/ity/ism? 127
2. Postcolonial Reasons for Theological Reasoning 133
3. Hybridity as an Attribute of a Postcolonially Touched Diasporic
Theological Temperament 140
4. Diasporic Imaginary: A Fugued Homing Desire 147
Part II
Chapter 1
From Cult to Liturgy, from Liturgy to Life and Lures of Diaspora:
The Liturgical Tainstvo of Alexander Schmemann 156
1. Theology as Minority Discourse: Negotiating Liturgical
Exoticism, Mystical Orientalism and Lures of Diaspora 159
2. Resisting the "Western" Captivity: Exodus or Return to "the
Fathers"? 167
3. Liturgy: Reclaiming Its Sacramental Glories and Uncovering Its
Ethical Perils 174
Chapter 2
From the "Poetry" of Liturgy to the "Prose" of Emmanuel Levinas: On
Not Already Being Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise 201
1. Resisting the Captivity of Splendor and Levitation: Religion as
Rite and "Liturgy" 206
2. Beyond Dreams and Incantations: Liturgy as Work 212
3. The Liturgy Which Comes to Mind in Conversation with the
Saraband of Innumerable Cultures 218
Part III
Chapter 1
Beyond the Rationale of Binarity: Counterpoint 228
1. Edward Said: Counterpoint as a Method of Interpretation
233
2. A Postcolonial Counterpoint: An Imaginary of Relationality
Beyond Coercion 242
Chapter 2
Sacramentality and Ethics: From Synergy to Counterpoint and Back
With a Difference 258
1. Synergy and Ethics 261
2. From Incarnation to Sacramentality: Synergy, Sacrament, and
Ethics 269
3. From Synergy to Sacrament: Toward a Sacramental Counterpoint
275
4. The Slow Victory: Sacramentality in Counterpoint 283
Chapter 3
The Counterpoint of Liturgy and Ethics: Rewriting the Paradigmatic
Last Chapter Diasporically 290
1. Theological Method as Relationally and Morally Accountable
Mindscape 294
2. Sacrament as a Template of Relationality: Hybrid, Contrapuntal,
Ethical 305
3. Liturgy and Ethics in Sacramental Counterpoint: Beyond
Aestheticized Oblivion and Liturgical Pelagianism 310
4. The Sacramental Counterpoint as Theological Method in a
Diasporic Imaginary: A Postcolonial Nuance 329
Coda 346
Bibliography 352
About this Dissertation
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