ABSTRACT
This chapter honours feminist theologians’ attentiveness to the present and continues my own affirmation of present experiences by considering how a relational and dynamic embodied eschatology can be both created and anticipated in the present. The reconstructions of eschatology that were developed in the previous chapters enable me now to speak of the future as a tactile time. That is, a time where bodies are in touch with themselves and one another in the fullness of relational, embodied freedom and also a time that can be touched in the present. This means that tactile relationships can be both signifiers of the eschaton and the eschaton itself made present in the flesh, here and now. Quite fittingly, then, I will propose that the practice of touch can facilitate such touching of the future. 2 In this way, I claim that the future can not only inform our actions in the present, but that the future itself can also be shaped and created by those actions. 3 Whilst this chapter aligns itself with much of feminist theology’s locatedness in the present, such reflections are here enabled by reading from and for the future.
