My experience of listening to, reading, teaching & beginning to learn from theologies that thematise identity in practical contexts (''liberation, local, "practice based", black, feminist, queer, trans, disability, etc etc’): they demand a deeper, more rigorous seriousness 1/

They ask me to interrogate the ways in which the categories that encode exploitative, oppressive social-economic hierarchies enter into the theologies that shape me & the communities & institutions of which I am a part. 2/

They ask me to attend to who gets hurt, excluded, explored, kept at the margins, silenced by the distributions of power, opportunity, space, the norms of speech, the conventions of preferences & structures of patronage, & how theologies may be complicit in that. 3/

They ask that I examine my own participation in those structures, my formation by them and in the theological habits and discourses that make them seem normal, ok, even admirable and worthy of emulation; to examine my part in reproducing them. 4/

They ask me to consider how my own subjectivity, identity and power have been shaped by that participation, how it has formed my teaching, my research agenda, my writing, my paper-giving, conference-attending, collegiality and why that positionality has been so opaque to me. 5/

They invite me to renew my theological practices, discourses, commitments and agendas and, they help resource that task, open up fresh possibilities, new ways to receive tradition, new perspectives on scriptures, reconfiguration of conceptual tools. 6/

They lead me to reconsider what faithfulness might mean today in the practise of theology. 7/7