Abstract

This is a thesis about place. More specifically, it is a Christian theology of place. My argument is not simple, but it is straightforward – place is a discursive structure of intelligibility or apprehension in the Holy Spirit that enables creatures to go-on in the world. To gloss Jeff Malpas, place is that on which our subjectivity is founded, it is the ‘somewhere’ that is necessarily entailed in every assertion of relationship. Places hold us in some sort of relationship of intelligibility with other creaturely bodies and as Pope Francis has so eloquently put it, “the history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places.” But precisely because place holds us in relationships that are produced and sustained through communicative exchanges, place also haunts us. Indeed, as Michel de Certeau remarks, “Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.” While places hold the potential for our intimate joining with one another in discourses of mutual recognition, places are also haunted by miscommunications, misrecognitions, and misinterpretations that point to histories that might have been other and hoped for futures that have not arrived. Contemporary theologies of place, while helpful, have been afflicted by a ‘colonial hole’ through an inattention to the role Christian theologies of place have played in the harms of colonialism. This thesis offers a critical reading against this tradition of Christian place theologies and provides a reparative and pastoral theology of place to aid in the ongoing work of reconciliation.