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César "CJ" Baldelomar talks to Dr. Mark Jordan about his theological writing and teaching

Drawing Hands (1948), lithograph by M. C. Escher

 
 

In this episode of OP Talks, doctoral candidate César "CJ" Baldelomar talks to his teacher and mentor Dr. Mark Jordan, whose work focuses on Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. The wide-ranging conversation touches on Dr. Jordan's teaching practice, on what led him to theology, and on his devotion to the act of private writing, which he believes helps him understand God.

Whether or not the work ever gets published, Dr. Jordan feels compelled to write “for protest and assertion, for pleasure and politics, but especially for self discernment,” because “I don’t know what I think or what I feel or what I hope until I can write some way into it.” His most sustained writing comprises hundreds of thousands of words in a journal he has kept since he was 16, one that “has taken all kinds of forms that I never expect to see published.”

The criterion of originality--in the humanities, at least-- is “highly overrated," Dr. Jordan tells Baldelomar. "At a most basic level, most of what we say is repetition. Language is all about repetition. Very occasionally, one of us can come up with a phrasing that is absolutely new or invent a word or something like that for good or for ill [but] a lot of theological words have done a lot of damage...The question is how artfully we do the collage."

When it comes to theology education, Baldelomar asks his mentor, what does he see as the power of fragmentation?

"Teaching in fragments is the condition of theology," explains Dr. Jordan. "Because of our ignorance and the limits of our language, we're incapable of giving a complete coherent exhaustive account of divinity, even of what divinity is doing in our individual lives. So one way to keep reminding ourselves of that is to write in fragments, because to write in clean connected systematic text, numbered propositions....encourages the illusion that you have a system. And the one thing you can be sure of in theology is [that] you don't have a system or, if you have a system, it's not theology."

 

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César J. Baldelomar

A scholar with wide-ranging interests, César "CJ" Baldelomar is a doctoral candidate in Theology and Education at Boston College, where he is currently working on his dissertation and teaching in the International Studies and Theology departments. His research blends critical theory (especially postmodernism and poststructuralism) and decolonial thought, exploring how knowledge production (epistemology, theory, and scholarship) and consumption (teaching and learning) inform the formation of identities (ontologies). His work seeks to find different ways to imagine and talk about the self and about justice in an effort to envision possible sites of resistance. CJ is the author of several academic and popular articles and of the upcoming book, Fragmented Theological Imaginings (Convivium Press).

He holds two law degrees from St. Thomas University School of Law: a Master of Laws (LL.M) in Intercultural Human Rights and a Juris Doctor, with certificates in immigration law and international law. CJ also holds a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from the Harvard Divinity School and a Master of Education (Ed.M) in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a former legal intern at the Southern Poverty Law Center and current Associate Member Representative of The Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). You can read more of CJ's work here or learn more about him here.

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Mark Jordan

Dr. Mark D. Jordan, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, is a scholar of Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. He spent his childhood in Ajijic, Mexico, where his parents lived in a community of expatriate artists. He currently teaches courses on the Western traditions of Christian soul-shaping, the relations of religion to art or literature, and the prospects for sexual ethics. Dr. Jordan holds a BA from St. John's College, and MA and PhD degrees from University of Texas at Austin. Over the last three decades, he has written extensively on sexual ethics, producing books that are widely regarded as opening important new conversations. But he has also continued to explore longstanding topics at the boundaries of philosophy and Christian theology. 

His latest book Transforming Fire (Eerdmans 2021) tells a brief history of the imagined scenes of theological education. He is at work on another manuscript about the neglected languages of queer spirituality. Dr. Jordan has received a number of grants and fellowships, including a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays grant (Spain), and a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology. With support from the Ford Foundation, he led a seminar on public debates about religion and sexuality for rising scholars from the United States and abroad. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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