Un/familiar Theology: Reconceiving Sex, Reproduction and Generativity

Much Christian theological discussion of family, sex and marriage seems to claim that they are (or should be) unchanging and immaculate; that to celebrate their shifting and developing natures is to reject them as good gifts of God. However, marriage, family, parenting and reproduction have changed and are changing. These changes are not a raging tide to be turned back, but in continuity with goods deeply embedded in the tradition. Alternative forms of marriage and family stand as signs of the hope of the possibility of change. Changed institutions, such as same-sex marriage, are new beginnings with the potential to be fruitful and generative in their own right. In them, humans create new imaginaries which more fully acknowledge the interactive nature of our relationships with the world and the divine.

Through engagement with theologies of adoption, pro-natalism, marriage, and queer theology, Susannah Cornwall figures developments in models of marriage and family not as distortions of or divergences from the divinely-ordained blueprint, but as developments already of a piece with these institution's being.

1. Introduction: Un/familiar Theology

2. Generativity and the Content of Marriage
2.i. Fictive Reproduction
2.ii. Psychological Accounts of Generativity: Generativity as Life Stage
2.iii. Singing a New Song? Robert Song's 'Covenant Partnerships'
2.iv. Christians Do Not Own Marriage
2.v. The Content of Marriage
2.vi. God's Gift

3. Natality
3.i. Introduction: History/Herstory
3.ii. Born of a Woman: Natality in the Work of Grace Jantzen
3.iii. Ruptures and Disjunctions: Natality and Witness
3.iv. Born to a New World: The Generativity of Death
3.v. Reproducing Natality: Ever-Old and Ever-New?
3.vi. The Population Crisis
3.vii. Natality and Personalism

4. Adopting Our Own: Worldless Newcomers or Children of a Common God?
4.i. Similitude and Difference
4.ii. Social Birth and Shared Fate
4.iii. Natals and their Worlds
4.iv. Bad Blood: Christian Rejections of Adoption
4.v. Adoptive Identity and Christian Empire
4.vi. Relativizing Genealogy, Maintaining Animality
4.vii. A Set of Special (and Un/familiar) Cases

5. Quiverfull and Generativity
5.i. A Numbers Game?
5.ii. Quiverfull and Non-Biological Reproduction
5.iii. The Problem with Reproductive Futurism
5.iv. Reframing Reproductive Futurism
5.v. Alterity and the Otherness of the Child

6. Un/familiar Institutions: Repetition and Difference
6.i. Repetition and Difference
6.ii. Born Again / Born From Above
6.iii. Idou kaina poio panta: I Make Everything New / I Do Everything Anew

7. Conclusion

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