This is a truly dynamite book. Although it may seem initially descriptive to write that the book is about divine immanence and panentheism, it recasts those pale initiatives in stunning directions and with almost distractingly dazzling prose.
The essays, in order of appearance, reflect on early, developing, and later feminism, which feminism is then wonderfully incorporated into an essay on Emily Dickinson's “And Truth—So Manifold.” The next essay takes off from an art exhibition by reviewing a crisis in modern art that derives from the representation (icon and idol) of the frontal female body, then segues into an essay about the ongoing implications of “matter” and “materialism.” Keller's next essay begins by discussing Augustine's Confessions and the pluriform identity of Monica, follows with “The Becoming of Theopoetics,” and moves on into Derrida. The next several essays deal with political or liberation theology. A final essay, “The Queer Multiplicity of Becoming,” rounds out the many bases Keller covers.
“Intercarnations, however, is not a polemic. To put its theological task positively: it witnesses to the multiplication and entanglement of any and all becoming flesh” (2) … “Incarnation itself gets radically redistributed as the becoming divine of us all” (108). There is a whole essay on theosis and theopoesis.
Alert readers may properly suspect that truly volcanic prose is in the offing. Look forward to impressive neologisms, such as phallogoanthropoheterowhite, carnal apophasis, incarnatus interruptus, ontotheological nounhood, irreducible plurisingularity, the poetophobic dominance of the straight—oh so very straight—logos, Joycean chaosmos, Derridapocalypse, Tingle of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of the New(ish) Materialism, tehomic fecundity, pluriverse, hauntological historiography, eratohistoriography, and queer temporal drag. “Entanglement is not a casual metaphor. It names the endlessly, ecosocially interlinked planetarity that materializes in mysteriously multiplying multiplicities” (197).
Interspersed throughout such prose, we find some delicious ironies and humors such as “[Augustine's] Confessions is a woman's Life [sic]” (84). In an essay on feminism and the divine, the author notes the problem of a visual divine person: “Is our divine gal-pal any freer from the person-problem than the guy in the sky?” (27). Do we have an “obsession with the singular guy incarnate” (2)? She cites the sixties mantra, “God is coming, and She is pissed” (16), notes that “[D]ivine Daddy [is] in drag” (18), and mentions “Monty Python's satiric prayer ‘O Lord you are so very very big’” (156).
As you read, bring at least an introductory comfort level with Whitehead, Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Meister Eckhart, John of Damascus, Augustine, Emily Dickinson, liberation theology, and Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, as well as the Lotus Sutra. Probably not for undergraduates.
In particular, the present reviewer is impelled to reread Augustine's Confessions, da capo and with no previously formed opinions. Besides her substantial reassessment of Augustine's and Monica's inmost identities as revealed (or not) in the text, the author regales us with yet more examples of her outrageous but delightfully enjoyable prose: “Who is the Bride, who the Groom, in this strange woman's life? Augustine is grooming himself for Wisdom …” (93). “Those divine ears again, those gynomorphic organs, open, liquid” (97). “If death [of Monica] let the deep [tehomic] gush through his eyes, let us now examine how it wells up in the ducts of his hermeneutics” (97). For Keller, Monica is “Not [sic] just the lachrymose mother or the frigid Sapientia—but la mère qui jouit” (103). Augustine has a “de-oedipalized respect for Monica” (11).
Well, have present readers of this review caught their breaths? The volcanic impact of such important issues, the repeatedly unexpected neologisms, and equally unexpected jokes and puns (“atheism mascarading as theos”) (106) never lets up.
Might these essays be compli/emented by the inclusion of something on Hegel's dialectic of intraconstitutive interrelationality, Teilhard's Christogenesis and hominization, Hopkins’ Christ playing “in ten thousand places,” Johann Adam Möhler's “ongoing incarnation,” and Ignatius’ divine omnipresence and concursus in the Contemplatio?
The book is a kaleidoscopic and creative presentation of unexpected insights into numerous important theological issues. Frankly, I chose to read it through twice to get fully on the book's wavelength and found it truly valuable and delightful.
