A Year of Writing

And Gratitude

It has been a good year of writing. Last year, when I was sunk in a bit of a spiritual depression, a friend challenged me to write 25 bylines in 2022. I was such a novice writer that I thought “byline” meant “discrete essay”, and so I set off. (It turns out “byline” means “discrete publications”, oops). By my understanding of the challenge, if you count this Substack with the 13 essays I put out this year (listed below), I have met that goal. (If you go by his, I didn’t come close!)

There were 17 installments in this substack, which started as a bit of a lark. The truth was, I wasn’t sure writing was for me. I had been ten years home with three young children, with graduate school long behind me in the rearview mirror and with it any promise of a “real job”. I began graduate school heavily pregnant. I spent those five years in Atlanta in despair because I had been told that I wasn’t much of a writer, and that it was unlikely I could learn to be one while also a new mother (really, someone said this). I suppose it might have been true at the time, though I suspect my particular energy (half caffeinated squirrel, half traditionally feminine housewife) was just not well-suited to the self-serious progressive vibe that I was inhabiting. As a colleague said to me once, “the difference about you, Kirsten, is that you are just not pissed off all the time.” Indeed.

That sense of “not fitting” was exacerbated by not getting a “real job” as well as marrying someone who had one, which led to many years of others insisting that I should just get on with enjoying my material comforts and my young (and it must be said, adorable) children. I did enjoy them, desperately, knowing both how quickly the time would go but also knowing how much my presence with them had cost me. I buried myself in their newborn bodies, their chubby legs, the sadness of my isolation consoled by their needy hands, grasping mine. I enjoyed them as much as I could while bearing also the awareness that my hungry intellect was largely preoccupied with sleep schedules and tantrums and other’s needs. I buried my hopes for a scholarly career in their little bodies. But I could never manage to bury my mind.

In the Christian tradition “curiositas” has a bad name. Paul Griffiths, in Intellectual Appetites, notes that “curiositas”, which often comes into English as curiosity, as nearly always been rendered a vice:

For Christians, however, [as opposed to pagans] the word almost always labelled an appetite always potentially vicious and usually actively so; and their discussions of it were polemical, aimed at separating their catechetically-formed identity from that of their pagan interlocutors by offering a critique of the disciplinary regimes that produced curiositas by contrasting them with those that produced studiositas.

I was puzzled initially by this distinction because I had thought curiosity was my chief strength. I have always been characterized by an intellectual intensity, to know and acquire. In my youth it was books, of which I have many. As I age I buy fewer books, and read fewer, but I inhabit them more thoroughly. The books I work with- Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, Pseudo-Dionyius, Anselm’s Proslogion, Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars, Julian of Norwich’s Divine Showings, a version of Martin Luther that, it must be said, only I see there, Karl Barth (all of it!)- these texts are the map that I use to find my way through everyday life. They are treasures- not the books themselves, but the world made possible through time spent with them.

Theological concepts are not concrete facts. They are spacious realities that are rendered possible only by dwelling with them. Forgiveness is an impossible proposition, unless it is made true by dwelling with its requirement. Sacrifice, too, is an improbable equation, but its truth is clear when it is narrated. Christians must live with texts not for their propositions but for the way they witness to a different world.

This, it turns out, is what Griffith’s has in mind with the distinction between “curiositas” and “studiositas”:

But the deepest contrast between curiosity and studiousness has to do with the kind of world that the seeker for and professor of each inhabits. The curious inhabit a world of objects, which can be sequestered and possessed; the studious inhabit a world of gifts, given things, which can be known by participation, but which, because of their very natures can never be possessed.

Living fully for the Christian includes, I hope, a bit of “studiositas”. This is a troubled proposition when it is put too squarely, for it is often assumed to include within it an assumption of privilege and leisure. I think this is misguided. All a Christian needs is one good intellectual companion- even one good book- to expand the possibilities of her discipleship. One deep read through Augustine’s Confessions can nourish you for a while. But it is not the knowledge but the participation- the accompanying- that is the goal here.

My year of writing has been an attempt to discipline my curiosity by letting it loose a bit. I wrote, somewhere, about my plan to just “throw things at the wall and see what sticks”. The disciplines of academic writing impose strict conventions on the intellect. I am grateful for these, but they often do not serve the broader goal of actually communicating with one’s readers. This substack has been a broad experiment in voice and nerve, in setting upon the page something of a theological imagination and seeing what shape it took, in figuring out what I knew.

This year of writing has made it clear to me what direction I hope to take in the coming year. I have a book contract, and plans for this first book to be part of a trilogy where I set out the shape of creaturely life in Chrsitological form (if you do not know what this means, I think you will once I explain it). I have also found that the substack is my favorite thing I have written. It feels like letting people in on a secret, in opening a bit of my mind to others and seeing what takes. I do not use much social media (though I do use Instagram, which I love for the way it connects me to other dahlia growers and bakers and such), so I have not sought a readership- but I am grateful to those of you who have subscribed and shared this.

I will be completing my year of Lord of the Rings this month. Next year, I am hoping to set off on a bit of a secret project here- assuming that I can figure out how to fit that in with what has become a surprisingly fruitful season for my own professional life.

Below, I have linked the other writing I have put out in 2022. If you’d like a copy of something that is behind a paywall, just shoot me an email (especially if you want to read my Sonderegger paper- I have a soft spot for anyone else who reads Sonderegger). One of my favorite pieces was a hardly-read review of Brian Daley’s excellent book on Chacledonian Christology, published in the Scottish Journal of Theology.

Let me leave you with this- if you are someone with a hungry intellect, with a mind that feels restless, maybe lean into it a bit. Send me an email and I’ll recommend a book to read. If you are local, join one of my cohorts. I do believe the world needs more people who attach themselves to truth. I do hope you will join me in this endeavor.

I’ll be back after the holiday with some essays on this wonderful third volume and our beautiful Hobbits.

Cheers

Kirsten

1. November 19, 2022. “Scripture Breathes Another Air”. Katherine Sonderegger panel, American Academy of Religion, Reformed Theology Unit.

2. November 16, 2022. “Kites”. Mere Orthodoxy online.

3. November 14, 2022. “Can I Get a Witness? A Response to Tim Keller.” Mere Orthodoxy online.

4. November 7, 2022. “After After Virtue".” Mere Orthodoxy online.

5. October 3, 2022. “Faith and Doubt Aren’t Black and White” in Christianity Today.

6. August 15, 2022 “Modern Mothers” at Plough online.

7. June 21, 2022. “Disasters Often Bring Revelation Rather than Punishment”

8. Summer 2022. The Evangelical Question in the History of American Religion at The Hedgehog Review print issue Vol. 24 No. 2.

9. May 25, 2022. Review - “God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered” at Scottish Journal of Theology.

10. May 19, 2022. “How Seminary Downsizing Cuts into Community” at Christianity Today.

11. March 8, 2022. “In the Shoes of the Woman Considering Abortion” at Plough.

12. February 14, 2022. “Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?” at Christianity Today.

13. January 10, 2022. “Consolation Enough” at TEDS Sapientia blog.