By dealing death on dark life, whiteness and white supremacy reveals itself dangerously asleep, and so liable to divine judgment. Black life, alternatively, is already “awake” with the illumination of a future reality in which the dead things are brought back to life.
Liberation, caught between queer nihilism and eschatological certainty, must seek an third way beyond the binary of hopefulness and hopelessness through the negation of both. It must transpose itself into an apophatic register as the experience of continual failure, an uncertain endless becoming, that might be called simple hope.
What is theology for? In her new book, Karen Kilby outlines the purpose, as well as the limits of theological reason.
By Brad East