The Theologist is your guide to all things writing and publishing in the fields of theology and biblical studies, from finding inspiration for your work to reading the best literature on writing, from overcoming writing obstacles to finding writing mentors, and more. In this installment, we interview Linn Marie Tonstad, author of God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2017) and Queer Theology (Cascade, 2018). Tonstad is also the co-editor of Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (2023).
Who would you like to read your books and why?
I see my work as trying to provide tools for reading what are taken to be settled debates differently, or for recognizing the pitfalls that come from some typical academic habits of mind in terms of the debates we want to intervene in and the effects we hope our work will have. If we start over here, or move across the field like this rather than like that, perhaps even what we think of as the field will look different, and will give us possibilities for something else to happen. That said, I’m told that my Queer Theology book (Cascade, 2018) has even been used in some youth group contexts, which is a source of great delight!
What three books do you think every systematic theologian should read?
That’s a tough one because I think people benefit from having read different things. But I do think reading at least one or two systematic thinkers well and, well, systematically is a crucial skill for any systematic and ideally constructive theologian to have, no matter how much or little such systematicity might play an ongoing role in their own practice. I also believe in reading eclectically; there’s so much to be learned in unexpected places and following one’s own pleasures to some extent is also a helpful guideline given that almost none of us will ever have read nearly as much as we ought to have.
What do you try most to avoid as a writer?
Mere repetition of the obvious, or of what ought to be obvious. My hope is that there’s a reason for me—not as a solitary individual, but simply as a person—to do the writing I’m doing, rather than another, that the particularities of reading, writing, and living that make up that elusive and fictional ‘I’ that does the writing will affect what emerges in ways that might be surprising.
What have been your biggest breakthroughs in writing throughout your training and career?
Mark Jordan and Kent Brintnall taught me that we have to write to create the audiences (for which read: conversation partners) with whom we could have the conversations we most want to have.
What was one of the most surprising things you learned in writing and publishing your books?
How much editing matters. Like many academics, I’m a decent first-draft writer: my first drafts will be readable and relatively coherent, but when I learned to edit my work intensively, I was shocked by how much better it became. Being edited by others is harder, but it matters at least as much.
What have you learned about yourself through your experiences writing and publishing?
Although there are readers from whom I learn a lot, for me one of the hardest challenges of writing is to set aside the imagined responses of imagined readers. One of the few ways I know how to do that is to focus on whether the writing I’m doing is pleasing to me, whether it feels substantial and somehow tested. I don’t mean this in any solipsistic or arrogant sense, just that in order to write at all, I have to write to please myself.
In three sentences or less, describe the underlying theme running through the whole of your work.
I’m interested in how we learn to live with what we hate, in how being present to antagonism can inform something like ethics. It may be surprising for someone whose first book was on the Trinity to say that I’m oriented toward paying really, really close attention to everyday existence, but it was paying such attention that taught me something about how language works in practice, in a way that fundamentally ended up informing the argument of that book. And I remain intensely curious about how looking at things (situations, theories, people) from multiple perspectives can offer transformative surprise without requiring a constant self-relativization.
How do you handle feedback on your writing from other scholars with whom you might disagree?
I expect disagreement, though I don’t write to elicit it. But when we deal with matters that matter to people, their responses will escape our hopes for how we wish to be understood, read, and engaged—which is one of the things I think a lot about in my work, in terms of learning to want to live with that inevitability. It may go without saying that it can be frustrating to feel misunderstood. Because I have a habit of somewhat obliquely summarizing views with which I’m about to disagree, people sometimes quote me as saying things that are directly opposed to what I’m actually arguing, but that might be a problem with my writing style rather than their reading!
If writing for publication entails the risk of putting your own thinking on display before others, has this practice of risk affected you in any significant ways and/or contributed to your own development as a thinker and person?
I love this question! To put something in writing—in print—risks being wrong, being misunderstood, having missed the point, having been interested in something you later decide (or realize) doesn’t matter, or doesn’t matter in the way you thought it did. But for me it is also a commitment to doing the best that I am able to, as the person, reader, and writer that I am at that point in time, to say something that might be useful, might matter, might give tools for others to do something else. I tend not to say much on social media that I think will be controversial (or these days much at all), because I want what I write to be something I’m willing to take consequences for, even if I become someone else later on. Because thinking, like all else, happens in the body and in time, the commitments expressed in writing are temporally fleeting attempts to delineate where you are willing to find yourself later on.
What book (or books) are you currently reading?
I’m currently reading Brian Dillon’s Affinities, after finishing his Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, and loving all three. As a critic, writer, and thinker, I find him expansive as well as a model of how to pay attention to craft at the level of the sentence, something I hope to learn how to do more consistently. Perhaps a bit late in life, I’ve been reading more poetry recently, including Carl Phillips and Jack Spicer. I also loved John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, which is a generous and generative book about communication that escapes any easy description.
Do you have any projects in the works?
Sometime in the not-too-distant (I hope!) future, I’ll be finishing my next book, The Impossible Other, which is a book about the difficulties of writing theology and queer theory, about how distortive the university can be of the activities we pursue therein, and about what happens when the other gives us what we do not want.
Linn Marie Tonstad is Associate Professor of Theology, Religion, and Sexuality at Yale Divinity School. Tonstad is the author of God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2017) and Queer Theology (Cascade, 2018).