Ashley Graham
My academic journey originated in actor training. However, artistic endeavors soon yielded to questions concerning: (1) idolatry as critiqued by and perpetuated in religious thought, and (2) divine transcendence as it entices artistic, textual, phenomenal, and ethical expression. Thus, my scholarly expertise lies in systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Upon graduating from Emory University’s doctoral program, I brought the fruits of my philosophical education into the business world. The Human Resources field afforded opportunities not unlike those of philosophical pedagogy: formulating ethical practices, developing employees’ critical thinking, and connecting the organization with community needs. My coursework in philosophical ethics aided me in the interrogation of interviewing and hiring processes. My coursework in philosophy of religion contributed to my formation of a corporate social responsibility program. And my love of comparative literature courses served me while training employees in principles of communication. I am grateful to have had these opportunities while founding an AdTech company's People Operations department. Yet, with each season of gratitude comes the call to new challenges. I am seeking opportunities that would permit me to return, albeit with new implications, to writing and teaching.
Supervisors: Wendy Farley, Andrea White, Jill Robbins, and Jeffrey Bloechl
Address: Dallas, Texas, United States
Supervisors: Wendy Farley, Andrea White, Jill Robbins, and Jeffrey Bloechl
Address: Dallas, Texas, United States
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Papers by Ashley Graham
In light of all this, the author is a living paradox. The creature of a deeply sacramental tradition…he tries to affirm and commend the embrace of the world which that tradition and its liturgical expression would convey to others of Christian faith met for worship. Simultaneously, however, his own monastic engagement must be taken not with reluctance but with a certain wariness…. While he lives happily in this earthly city, he realized that it does not abide and that his true enfranchisement is in another city which does abide but whose presence is not yet wholly consummated in space and time.
I must admit to my own occupation of his “living paradox”—with a twist. It is this twist, both wrenching and freeing, that I will attempt to trace in my connections between scholarship and experiences of the Church of Christ. Unlike, Aidan Kavanagh, I do not have an ecclesial role or deep liturgical commitments as my foundation for doing “secondary theology.” He begins with a love of worship that then implies a love for the world. Lex orandi founds lex credendi, which leads to lex agendi. Right worship gives birth to belief, which then bears the fruits of spirit-filled action in the world. Correspondingly, what we believe (lex credendi) affects what we ask of God (lex supplicandi). According to Kavanagh, the statuat of orthodoxy undergirds these moves: a standard of praise shapes the canonicity of belief and behavior.
My aim is not an exposition of his liturgical theology, so much as the recognition that for Kavanagh, worship informs how the Christian derives meaning. And liturgy does not often derive meaning in ways that the systematic theologian would expect. Kavanagh claims that liturgical structures manifest meaning in ways not readily accessible to those outside the structures. While it would seem tautological that those who engage in the structures of worship best derive its meaning—Kavanagh draws us to two paradoxes. First, the liturgical calls him to embrace the world, however he prizes the ‘deeper structures’ that lie outside space and time. And the second paradoxical reality: several of this colleagues and students have long been outside the church, embracing the world to determine the value of liturgical structures. The first paradox is his own; the second is now mine.
My paper will chart the interaction between my academic training in performance studies (Aristotle’s mimesis, method acting’s anamnesis), literary theory (Derrida’s exegesis of the Rabbi versus the poet), sacramental theology (mysterion v. Tertullian’s sacramentum), and finally, hermeneutical phenomenology (Levinas’ Infinite, Lacoste’s liturgical ontology). In each of these academic disciplines, I learned more about what it means to ‘be the church’ than I learned properly within ecclesial roles afforded me.
Patience seems, then, to suggest a certain temporal pluralism, a certain pluralisation of the self in time. It is radically opposed to the act by which I despair of the other person, declaring that he is good for nothing, or that he will never understand anything, or that he is incurable…
The reductions exposed by these thinkers each enact a collapse of time’s dimensionality, a kind of despairing fatalism (“nothing…never…incurable”) or undifferentiating absolutism (everything…always…everywhere). I will conclude, then, not far from Marcel’s own position, by signaling the contributions of art and religion in preserving dimensionality and irreducibility. In their respective ways, both the arts and religious beliefs can startle the misperceptions that would otherwise deny the gifts of manifold time: forgiveness, change, hope. Both provide ways of resisting the violence of the fatum—which may be after all a fatal reduction of time, place, and spirited body. By modeling how the finite can engage an infinite, art and religion have the potential to reverse this violence: awakening us to a perception that is beyond the moment, beyond the single interpretation, even perhaps, beyond perception itself.
In light of all this, the author is a living paradox. The creature of a deeply sacramental tradition…he tries to affirm and commend the embrace of the world which that tradition and its liturgical expression would convey to others of Christian faith met for worship. Simultaneously, however, his own monastic engagement must be taken not with reluctance but with a certain wariness…. While he lives happily in this earthly city, he realized that it does not abide and that his true enfranchisement is in another city which does abide but whose presence is not yet wholly consummated in space and time.
I must admit to my own occupation of his “living paradox”—with a twist. It is this twist, both wrenching and freeing, that I will attempt to trace in my connections between scholarship and experiences of the Church of Christ. Unlike, Aidan Kavanagh, I do not have an ecclesial role or deep liturgical commitments as my foundation for doing “secondary theology.” He begins with a love of worship that then implies a love for the world. Lex orandi founds lex credendi, which leads to lex agendi. Right worship gives birth to belief, which then bears the fruits of spirit-filled action in the world. Correspondingly, what we believe (lex credendi) affects what we ask of God (lex supplicandi). According to Kavanagh, the statuat of orthodoxy undergirds these moves: a standard of praise shapes the canonicity of belief and behavior.
My aim is not an exposition of his liturgical theology, so much as the recognition that for Kavanagh, worship informs how the Christian derives meaning. And liturgy does not often derive meaning in ways that the systematic theologian would expect. Kavanagh claims that liturgical structures manifest meaning in ways not readily accessible to those outside the structures. While it would seem tautological that those who engage in the structures of worship best derive its meaning—Kavanagh draws us to two paradoxes. First, the liturgical calls him to embrace the world, however he prizes the ‘deeper structures’ that lie outside space and time. And the second paradoxical reality: several of this colleagues and students have long been outside the church, embracing the world to determine the value of liturgical structures. The first paradox is his own; the second is now mine.
My paper will chart the interaction between my academic training in performance studies (Aristotle’s mimesis, method acting’s anamnesis), literary theory (Derrida’s exegesis of the Rabbi versus the poet), sacramental theology (mysterion v. Tertullian’s sacramentum), and finally, hermeneutical phenomenology (Levinas’ Infinite, Lacoste’s liturgical ontology). In each of these academic disciplines, I learned more about what it means to ‘be the church’ than I learned properly within ecclesial roles afforded me.
Patience seems, then, to suggest a certain temporal pluralism, a certain pluralisation of the self in time. It is radically opposed to the act by which I despair of the other person, declaring that he is good for nothing, or that he will never understand anything, or that he is incurable…
The reductions exposed by these thinkers each enact a collapse of time’s dimensionality, a kind of despairing fatalism (“nothing…never…incurable”) or undifferentiating absolutism (everything…always…everywhere). I will conclude, then, not far from Marcel’s own position, by signaling the contributions of art and religion in preserving dimensionality and irreducibility. In their respective ways, both the arts and religious beliefs can startle the misperceptions that would otherwise deny the gifts of manifold time: forgiveness, change, hope. Both provide ways of resisting the violence of the fatum—which may be after all a fatal reduction of time, place, and spirited body. By modeling how the finite can engage an infinite, art and religion have the potential to reverse this violence: awakening us to a perception that is beyond the moment, beyond the single interpretation, even perhaps, beyond perception itself.
In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity through flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. (I intend both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change.)
I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of body to theologized spirit by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind." I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges the concrete place over the abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more plural sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, an interplay between “retention” and “protention,” resists a reduction of the present to an isolated moment. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I conclude with Marcel’s call for patient perception, even hope, acknowledged in the “the pluralisation of the self in time.”
In transposing Scarry's text into theological aesthetics, then, we cannot neglect the concerns of human suffering. Therefore, this paper will pursue her observations through Biblical poetry-the texts hung taut between theophany (beholding God) and theodicy (holding God in contempt).
First, I will expose the "error of beauty" inherent in the ethical symmetry of retributive justice. Second, with the insights of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez's On Job, and lain Matthews' Soundings from St. John of the Cross, I will suggest God's sublimity as the asymmetry that exposes this error.! From the asymmetrical site of sublime theophany, I will then re-enter Scarry's text as an apologia of love. This will require reading against Scarry's concept of ethical symmetry, focusing instead on her own asymmetrical sites of beauty: the object, the event and the replication. I will conclude by sketching love's aesthetic as asymmetrical beauty, exemplified in two theo-poetic sites: the Creator's incarnation and the created's sacramentality.
When the confusion of Babel meets the profusion of Pentecost, the church searches for points of convergence, of a center where certainty holds. Perhaps the center is not certainty, but rather, the experienced love of God, the foolishness of the cross, and the glory of the resurrection. It is here we bring our silence and our expression, our spirits and our flesh. I make a case for an encounter with God that demands our all—not only our sound minds and suspicious hearts, but also the no less necessary spiritual senses. In doing so, I will locate Alexander Campbell and David Lipscomb in the broader strokes of theological aesthetics.
As a member of the Brookline Community, I wrestled often with how the church can be both a home for a distinct doctrinal family, and a space that welcomes the marginalized. How can one be at home while also practicing an exilic faith—open to the presence of God within and beyond pre-determined borders? Given the nature of this question, my sermon borrows voices from within and beyond the Christian tradition. With this strange chorus, I wished to honor Brookline’s hospitality to me, and emphasize Christ as the ever-exceeding boundary by which we learn our capacity to welcome others.
In transposing Scarry's text into theological aesthetics, then, we cannot neglect the concerns of human suffering. Therefore, this paper will pursue her observations through Biblical poetry-the texts hung taut between theophany (beholding God) and theodicy (holding God in contempt).
First, I will expose the "error of beauty" inherent in the ethical symmetry of retributive justice. Second, with the insights of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez's On Job, and lain Matthews' Soundings from St. John of the Cross, I will suggest God's sublimity as the asymmetry that exposes this error.! From the asymmetrical site of sublime theophany, I will then re-enter Scarry's text as an apologia of love. This will require reading against Scarry's concept of ethical symmetry, focusing instead on her own asymmetrical sites of beauty: the object, the event and the replication. I will conclude by sketching love's aesthetic as asymmetrical beauty, exemplified in two theo-poetic sites: the Creator's incarnation and the created's sacramentality.
In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity through flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. (I intend both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change.)
I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of body to theologized spirit by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind” and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “place-taking” body. I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges the concrete place over the abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more plural sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, an interplay between “retention” and “protention,” resists a reduction of the present to an isolated moment. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I conclude with Marcel’s call for patient perception, even hope, acknowledged in the “the pluralisation of the self in time.”
It would seem that this particular denomination--and others jarred by the disconnect of meaning and form--is strangely caught somewhere between the certainty of God’s comprehensibility and a rejection of God’s “real presence.” For the purposes of evangelism, missionaries count the incarnation as God’s intelligibility. And yet, as if chastened by the shortcomings of their own somewhat colonizing presence, they explain away less intelligible meanings (suffering or, perhaps not unrelated postmodernist pleas) with deficient sacramentality. It is a precarious position to occupy: simultaneously holding truth as an accessible object (commodified for the purposes of evangelism) and suspicions of God’s presence in materiality.
This paper will thus reformulate, constructively, the suspicions of sacramentality into a space for mystery—a presence marked by absence, a definitive meaning deferred. I will begin by examining Tertullian’s renaming of mysterion as sacramentum, and the implications of this move from God’s self-revelation as ‘secrets given’ to ‘vowed deposit carried into battle.’ Exposing this shift for missionary interests will (ideally) lead to a supple grip on truth, rendering faith as compelling, not compulsory.
I must locate myself, of course, as among the ‘they’ to whom I gesture. The Churches of Christ gifted me with this understanding: God is the source of a truth that precedes (grounds) and exceeds materiality, but is not present in creation. It is the religion qua double bind of Derrida: the claim that holiness is set apart (unscathed by human hands, thoughts), but that we must communicate and touch this holiness with our unholy means (material conveyances and immaterial concepts). On both accounts of how my denomination approaches ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge,’ Derrida’s critique provides a curious insight. If holiness as unknowable content cannot be touched (must be set apart), then our forms will be doomed to simulacra (copies without origin). But if our communications about the holy are to be more than simulacra, we must permit a God that can handle our hands. It would seem that to save the name, to let the holy, is to let the name take form and save us. For only the name, if holy and set apart, can initiate entry (revelation) and elusion (mystery).
Mystery as displaced by revealed truth, is perhaps isometric to my tradition’s disregard for God's real presence. “Leave us our simulacra!” seems not only the unspoken rule of revealed meaning as determinate, graspable, but also the rule that renders evangelized others as potential selves. I want to respect what conceptual footholds function for people. However, appeals to ‘Common Sense Philosophy’ have not held up to Campbell’s original intentions of ‘unity.’
Perhaps because unity cannot exist as a whole if it eradicates holes for the ‘other’ voices. A life of faith, without mystery, moves love to symmetry (economics of desert, obligation). At most, this symmetry exists as an exchange between competing truths (in danger of reducing both to sameness), or a war between competing truths (in danger of obliterating the other altogether).
At stake, then, in the deconstructive move: beauty reinstated as asymmetry, structural integrity via porousness. These notions guide several postmodern thinkers—those who puncture structures, cracking open meaning so that the other (Holy or human) can come. Sacramentality (in philosophy: the infinite that breaks open the totality, in theology: the Divine Absolute who inhabits human experience) serves as a shorthand term for this whole whose holes are apparent. Sacrament, like mystery, exemplifies the beauty of this porousness that accommodates asymmetry, infinite allusion, like an ellipsis of longing, or a wound yet unsealed by resurrection.
Deconstruction is not the enemy, and neither is theological construction. Nihilism is as hideous as over-speculation--nothing converges with everything at the extremities. Therefore, I return to the site of Plato’s Symposium as it relates Diotima's tale of Penia (lack) and Poros (fullness) copulating on Aphrodite's (beauty's) birthday, giving birth to Eros (desire). It will be a return to the beautiful as the event of gratuitousness: an occasion for Penia (deconstruction's negations) and Poros (construction's assertions) to come together—this time without drunken seduction—to produce an ongoing re-birth, the becoming of desire which is the life of faith.
I will then transition with Anne Carson’s reading of eros in Platonic analogies. In order to flesh out her rhetoric of paradoxical meanings made form, I will incorporate Sagan’s analogy of two-dimensional forms engaging three-dimensional forms. Alongside Lyotard’s somewhat mystical exploration of inter-dimensional relations, I will re-read the mystery of our “made in God’s shadow” (Genesis 1:27, tselem) within the "overshadow" of Christ's birth (Luke 1:35). This will open a conversation for those who require Biblical sites of asymmetrical appeal.
The first implication of asymmetrical appeal is a regard for what is "other"—even as it bears some symmetry to the self (since to discern the symmetrical, one has to see the overlaps in order to perceive the extensions; differance requires relation). The second implication of asymmetry is that it underwrites the holy virtues of faith, hope, and love.
If we were to read the writings of Levinas, Rosenzweig, and Marcel as extended riffs on this issue, how would we interpret issues of absolute knowledge, illusion, and alterity? How might Tillich be understood in relation to these ethical and philosophical questions? Choose the figures you wish to focus on and explore this question with as much creativity as you wish.
• Abstraction—as if God were an essence, accessed only in one’s rejection of mortality (Rosenzweig)
• Univocality—as if God were a calculation, universally accepted and adequate to our thinking (Heidegger)
• Ideology—as if God were an idea that could be digested, possessed, or forced, for our satisfaction (Weil)
• Totality—as if God were preserved by negating the transcendence of beings, or by evoking the neutrality of Being (Levinas)
• Purity—as if God were the basis for false dichotomies (Lacoste)
• Ultimacy—as if God’s unambiguous reality rendered us capable of
unambiguously representing God (Tillich)
These are illusory modes for any thinking the holy. God’s holiness, as ab-solute, withdraws from these illusions; however, God’s elusive absence is not their negation, nor sheer nothingness. Because the holy’s ab-solution is neither reducible to God’s presence to thought, nor adequated to our thinking of absence, it forges another mode for thinking: the allusive. The allusive mode thinks the way in which God’s absence takes on a certain presence in our encounters with alterity. These encounters with alterity—whether poetic, aesthetic, ethical, liturgical, or symbolic—allude to the God that both eludes and refigures the desire for relationship. Holiness thus becomes the possibility to host what eludes thinking, even as this ab-solution entices thought into its most rigorous patience and humility. God’s absence is not nothing. It is rather the gift of an expansive evacuation that opens thought, not to security or satisfaction, but to love.