Back into reading Soelle's memoir after a month off. I took a family trip and that involved some travel anxieties leading up to it and then recovering from some illness after it. Regardless, this sort of reading took a bit of a pause.

This morning I was reading Soelle's reflection on her feminism and really enjoyed this part:

"Perhaps my image of a happy life is less individualistic than that of many young women. I think that we need a certain kind of dependence in order to live, but not total emotional and economic dependence, the inability to organize our lives ourselves. There is a dependence that grows inside freedom: I could live by myself, but I want to life with you, enter into mutuality. The concept of dependence is often devalued in the woman’s movement; in whatever case, it is seen as deadly, as destructive of human beings. I find this wrong; I believe that mutual dependence is part of being human. Concretely, it means that I am sexually, spiritually, and emotionally dependent on others. I need conversation, challenge, critique, affection, understanding, and help in managing everyday life. I want to share my experiences with someone; I wish to give and to receive comfort."

One of the values of our age is the supremacy of the individual. This is a path we have been on for a long while now and you can feel its consequences in every area of society. Something I am particularly interested in is the way technology† has propelled this value to new extremes. Each new era brings with it technical advancements that further prioritizes the autonomy of the individual and weakens our communal bonds.

Today, the digital has ripped apart the previous era's clean separation of both the private and public realms. Each has crossed into the other in ways that we have yet to fully grapple with. The private has become commodified and made public for mass consumption while the public realm has become a space primarily dedicated to the protection of private interest.

I think what I like about what Soelle is writing here is that it represents a value that cuts against this entire trajectory that we have all just accepted. It feels somewhat jarring to advocate for mutual dependence in a time when all those things she mentions—one's sexual, spiritual, and emotional life—have been wholly defined by individual desire. The radical statement, to suggest that human beings need one another, is the antithesis of the technological pursuit.

But it is a pursuit that seeks to make us less human and more machine.

† I mean technology here in a broad sort of sense as we think about the trajectory of human 'progress.' It is an application of thinking that prioritizes efficiency or innovation over all else. We can apply this to things like automobiles, the replacement of porches with backyards, and of course the digital sphere.

“Theological reflection without political consequences was tantamount to blasphemy… Every theological statement has to be at the same time a political one.” (Soelle, Against the Wind)

All theology is, by its very nature, contextual. By that I mean it emerges out of a particular time and place by real people responding to the challenges and questions that matter to them and their communities. This is what makes it political. It's theology that matters.

Soelle is working in a very particular time, the aftermath of WWII in Germany. She develops much of her theological awareness during a period when the church seemed at its weakest, having aligned itself with fascism—and all its brutality. If theological reflection at its core might be considered our attempts to 'follow the tracks' of whatever we might think of God at work in our world, Soelle joined the Liberation theologians in identifying God as on the side of the poor and oppressed. What makes this a political statement is that it has tangible implications for the rest of us. As Soelle reflected,

"What I suffer from, and what I need and seek forgiveness for, are all the disastrous things that we, as a society, inflict today on the poorest of the poor and on our mother, the earth."

Good theology—real theology—changes us. Not just how we think, or what we believe, but in how we live in the world and what we do in it. If it doesn't, Soelle would say it doesn't matter, and that's what makes it blasphemous. What good is a theology that has no consequences?

"Demythologizing is often a means of telling the truth about the bosses of this world."

In her memoir, Soelle talks about how Rudolf Bultmann's theology more or less saved her faith, being an example of someone who was both deeply religious and intellectually curious. Bultmann's theology was one that sought to rescue Christianity from myth; not eliminating it, but interpreting it.

I like this line of hers, sharing the way a theology like this can help us make sense of the world—specifically when thinking about power.

On the weekend I began reading Dorothee Soelle's memoir, Against the Wind. Soelle is one of my favourite theologians but I've never really read about her life.

Something that jumped out in the early parts of the book was her talking about a teacher she had, saying, "her thinking takes sides."

She goes on to note that a good teacher needs more than knowledge, they must stand for something. Interestingly, Kingsnorth had similar things to say around the value of having a stance if we wish to be able to resist the Machine.

I think this is really important and something that is missing for a lot of people, having something to stand for. So much of who we are tends to be defined by what we're not or what we're against, but not enough of us are doing the hard work of asking ourselves, but what are we for?