Date of Award

Fall 9-5-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Theology

First Advisor

Miguel Díaz

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110-1167) treatise Spiritual Friendship and his fundamental insight, “God is friendship,” this dissertation seeks to understand how the divine arrives woven into the dynamics of human relationships. I bring together social media research, critical theories of language, queer phenomenology, queer temporalities, and liberation theologies into a cross-temporal erotic narrative between Aelred and me. The first part establishes the imaginative distemporal space of Sodom, based on a shared homosexual identity. It critiques historical and theological disciplines as familiarizing discourses that compel arrivals of the other through structures authentication and the social magic of professionalization. In the second part, Aelred’s own desires confront me when I wander the ruins of his twelfth-century abbey. Listening to these ‘echoes of the past,’ I find myself complicit in familiarizing discourses. The final chapter situates all definitive claims about the other, whether theological, historical, or relational, within temporal structures of teleological stability, as if we already know to be true what will be true about God, Aelred, or another. Desiring stability, we risk leaving behind others, whose experiences of the divine may disalign with what theologians already know to be true. They become remainders to our systems and ideological claims, and, in leaving these persons in the past, we ignore when the divine fails to act according to our desires for liberation. I propose a method of theological wandering (pervagatio) following Aelred’s dialogical method that flips the roles of student and teacher, that prefers and gives voice to the opinions, needs, concerns, and (failed) desires of the non-professional. It is, in brief, about noticing those who remain silent.

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