Voices from the Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology

Over the past several decades, scholars working in biblical, theological, and religious studies have increasingly attended to the substantive ways that our experiences and understanding of God and God’s relation to the world are structured by our experiences and concepts of race, gender, disability, and sexuality. These personal and social identities and their intersections serve as a hermeneutical lens for our interpretations of God, self, the other, and our religious texts and traditions. However, they have not received nearly the same level of attention from analytic theologians and philosophers of religion, and so a wide range of important issues remain ripe for analytic treatment. The papers in this volume address the various ways in which the aforementioned social identities intersect with, shape, and might be shaped by the questions with which analytic theology and philosophy of religion have typically been concerned, as well as what new questions they suggest to the discipline. We focus on three central areas of analytic theology: methodological principles, the intersection of social identities with religious epistemology, and the connections among eschatology, ante-mortem suffering, and ante-mortem social perceptions of bodies.

Michelle Panchuk, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Murray State University, Michael Rea, University of Notre Dame, Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy

Michelle Panchuk is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Murray State University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research is situated at the intersection of philosophy of religion, trauma theory, and feminist philosophy, with a special focus on the phenomenon of religious trauma. Her other interests include metaphysics and the history of Russian philosophy. She has published several articles on the metaphysics of divine concepts, on feminism in philosophy of religion, and on religious trauma

Michael Rea is Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2001. He is also a Professorial Fellow at the Logos Institute for Analytic & Exegetical Theology at the University of St. Andrews. His research focuses primarily on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and analytic theology. He has written or edited more than ten books and forty articles, and has given numerous lectures in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Russia, China, and Iran, including the 2017 Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews.