Margaret Kamitsuka

Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros is a work of critical and constructive theology informed by the phenomenon of erotic love. Within the Christian tradition, passion has long been associated with sinful lust, incurring shaming and accusations of narcissism. Contemporary theologies of eros, on the other hand, extol sexual desire as God-given, even sacred. This book eschews these two extremes through an examination of the complexities of love and desire, as narrated in biblical texts, allegorized by church fathers, manifested in the lives of mystics, analyzed in psychodynamic theory, and depicted in poetry, literature, and Christian art. The volume pairs writers on love as different as Augustine and Jane Austen or Angela of Foligno and Simone de Beauvoir. Desirable Belief argues that eros is human and, as such, informs the Chalcedonian claim of Christ as fully God and fully human. A christological perspective that takes eros into account, in turn, affects the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ, the nature of resurrected bodies in heaven, and whether trinitarian impassibility is still a coherent concept.

The afterlife continues to influence Christian faith and is a concern during fragile moments of reproductive loss. However, a doctrine of resurrection that speaks to death in the womb has yet to be considered. Ignoring fetal death began early in Christian history. The church has struggled for settled meaning regarding issues of personhood in the womb and whether unbaptized infants are saved. Believers today deserve to know the basis for a Christian hope of heaven. They deserve a nontoxic eschatology that sustains an embodied sense of self, which is fractured by the experience of reproductive loss. They deserve to know whether assenting to the resurrection of the body--including unborn bodies--requires them to sacrifice their reproductive self-determination. The dominant Christian narrative of postmortem survival hinges on the concept of an immaterial soul that continues after death. However, the soul's apparently contented communing with God during its interim existence makes a final bodily resurrection superfluous. A soul-based approach to postmortem survival may save souls, but it does not resurrect bodies. If one can secure the plausibility of the resurrection of unborn bodies whose personhood is in doubt, then one dispenses with ensouled personhood as a requirement of resurrection. Christian materialist thought provides a metaphysical alternative to soul-based resurrection. A materialist approach to resurrection echoes the apostle Paul's powerful seed metaphor in 1 Corinthians 15. Medieval Christianity embraced metaphors of sprouting grain and budding plants. Returning to these images carries promise for rethinking resurrection in ways not dependent on an immaterial soul. Modern minds are more inclined to think of persons not as souls in bodies but as bodies that emerge into being, evolutionarily and gestationally. Philosophical theories of emergence are capturing the attention of Christian thinkers. This book's budding-emergence approach to the resurrection aims to speak concretely to the reality of death, including the death of unborn beings.

Vulnerability is a notion discussed in feminist philosophy as a basis for a morality that widens our sense of those whose deaths are grievable. Vulnerability and grievability also factor in reproductive ethics. This essay employs recognition theory to analyze critically how these notions are mobilized in conservative Christian anti-abortion writings and in feminist philosophy. This analysis exposes weaknesses and misrecognition in both sets of discourses. In response, I offer theological arguments for recognizing fetal value without implying a right to life and for acknowledging how human finitude and the precarity of pregnancy render gestational hospitality a discretionary, not obligatory, moral act.