Date of Award

Spring 6-12-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Religious Studies

Organizational Unit

Joint Ph.D. Program in Study of Religion, College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Religious Studies

First Advisor

Carl Raschke

Second Advisor

Ted Vial

Third Advisor

Jason Jeffries

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Alterity, Ecotonality, Postcolonialism, Relationality, Theology, Trinity

Abstract

In this dissertation, I address the Trinity’s potential as an emancipatory relational archetype in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time recognizing the complicity of Christian doctrine in colonial conquest. My dissertation will be a reimagining of trinitarian theology as an ecotonal paradigm of multiplicity and alterity that provides a generative means of moving beyond the enmeshment of divinity with constructs of mastery.

The post-structuralist and postcolonial methodologies in this project emerge from the work of such scholars as Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Gloria Anzaldúa. They foreground critical ideations of otherness and multiplicity in ways that transgress the bounds of binary thinking. The project posits the Trinity as a thirding that complicates and problematizes binary categorizations of being – self/Other, divine/human, female/male, Black/white, human/non-human, civilized/savage, eternal/changing, transcendent/immanent – even being/non-being. The Ecotonal Trinity is a theological Third Space, in the Homi Bhabha sense of the term, of ontological and  conceptual ecotonality whose nature is a relational movement of otherness in, of, and yet distinct from self.

Copyright Date

6-2026

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Taylor Muma

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

315 pgs

File Size

1.4 MB

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