The Spirit as Plural Person

According to plural person theory, a group of close friends can act together not just distributively, as separate individuals all at once, but also corporately, as a nonmetaphorical plural person supervening on the friends. This article proposes that the Spirit is a plural person in precisely this sense. Modeling the Spirit as a plural person not only secures the Spirit's personhood and full divinity; it also provides a new conceptual scheme for interpreting the relationship between divine grace and human agency along non-competitive lines. What is more, it makes sense of existing Christian practices, including Ignatian contemplation, evangelical quiet time, and Quaker waiting worship

Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden’s Later Poetry and the Ethics of Friendship.

Scholars have for the most part kept quiet about the intersection of queerness and Christianity in the poetry of W. H. Auden, a gay British modernist poet who immigrated to America just before the outbreak of World War II and converted to Christianity shortly thereafter. Queering the City of God brings to light the queer commitments of Auden’s Christian poetry. His post-conversion oeuvre, which spans the early 1940s to the early 1970s, unfolded in the midst of two international crises: World War II and the Cold War. Fittingly, questions like, “What would a just society really look like?” and, “What role should art play in resisting a destructive political regime?” dominate his later work. He gives decidedly queer theo-ethical answers, interpreting his own participation in queer networks of friends through the lens of the Christian faith to construct gay subjectivity as an anti-imperialist prophetic vocation. These theo-ethical apologies for friendship give us purchase on several current issues in queer theory. Queering the City of God argues that (1) the pre-Stonewall perspective of Auden’s oeuvre provides a resource for thinking politically and ethically outside the strictures of gay pride. (2) Since Auden’s relationship with psychoanalysis cooled after he converted, his later poetry provides a resource for talking about gay subjectivity without using the pathologizing concepts of psychology. (3) And Auden’s later poetry, the labor of a gay Christian polymath, has much to offer current debates in academic theology about nature, grace, religious epistemology, and how to do ethics.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96141/1/obustion_1.pd

Autonomy and the Bonds of Love

Autonomy and the Bonds of Love offers a new account of the Spirit. Augustinian pneumatologies view the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son. Critics of this pneumatological tradition wonder how, if the Spirit is a relationship between persons, the Spirit can also be a person, full stop. One answer, I suggest, is that the Spirit is a plural person, a special kind of real and irreducible group agent supervening on close friends. The goal of this pneumatology is less to defend the truth of claims about the status of the Spirit in the eternal life of God and more to create a model that remedies gaps in theological anthropologies as well as in analytic philosophies of group agency. The former frequently make the Spirit responsible for human freedom without explaining how the Spirit empowers human beings to act freely; the latter largely overlook the role of caring and the emotions in human social life. On one level, then, my model of the Spirit moves the discipline of theological anthropology forward by showing how the Spirit’s indwelling a human believer could enhance rather than undermine their autonomy. On another level, the dissertation tells a non-confessional story about what friendship is, why autonomy requires vulnerability, and how different types of collective agency work