ABSTRACT
This essay introduces this project that is part of an important undertaking, as it aims to create what could be called a ‘poetics of Church’ and a ‘religious imaginary’ as alternatives to more institutional and conventional ways of thinking and being religiously, of being ‘Church’, at a time when the institutions of the Christian churches continue to decline (at least in the West). One of its concerns is for women’s marginalisation within the institutional Roman Catholic Church. And yet, the focus of the work is not so much on gender, per se, but on gender as a lens through which to see more clearly the paths from the theological to the poetic, on the marking of spaces hospitable to a gender fluidity that undoes the rigid gender binaries of the institutional Church. When women are denied a full presence in Church, the ‘dwelling space’ of the believer, when their voices are silenced, the ‘dwelling space’ is off-kilter. The project seeks then a ‘re-balancing’ in its creation of alternative spaces in which women and men might ‘poetically dwell’. The latter phrase, from a Hölderlin poem, explored and developed by Heidegger in his later poetic writing on poets, is introduced here as a subtext of the book and important ‘connective tissue’.
