about casual theographic, about me

If life = truth and appearence, then theology is the fill we casually dump into the abyss between.

Hi.  My name is Matt Frizzell.  I’m a PhD student at Chicago Theological Seminary in Theology and Ethics.  I’m studying theology, ethics, and critical theory.   While I believe in ecumenism and support the spirit of postdenominationalism, I am also a member of the Community of Christ.  Most importantly, I am a dad who loves his girls, am married to my best friend, an FA.  I love to read, write, motorcycles, and the outdoors.

Back to the quote above:  If the fill we call theology is good theology, I believe, it wrestles with life’s most enduring contradictions: feeling and thought, reason and passion, eros and apathy, hope and despair, sanity and suffering, female and male, black and white, heaven and earth, immanence and transcendence, the ineffable and proclamation. 

Casual Theographic is my scratch pad.  The terms themselves have double meaning.  On the one hand, the word “casual” signs every-dayness.  In America’s religious context, for many Christians, “God” and God-talk is casual.  God is everyday.   This phenomenon has both truth and falsehood entwined within it.  Our casualness with God’s in the everyday is possible because of the truth of both God’s immanent presence and absence.   This is a contradiction we cannot simply solve with dogma nor, with secular cynicism, simply walk away.

I chose the word “Theographic” because “-graphic” denotes an image or description.   What we have is not so much God at our disposal as our descriptions.  Perhaps, theographics is a better word for theology.  By itself, the term serves as a reminder to theology to not to take itself too seriously.   On this level, theographics communicate something that theology itself cannot ever fully contain.  Theology is always in truth only metaphor, image, or description.  It never reaches nor covers its object.  In that sense, “theographics” signifies both a freedom and indictment of religious language.   The indictment is the basis theological conviction.  We who write, speak, and participate in theology speak the truth only insofar as we take our words seriously. 

In that sense, theology speaks a testimony of God’s simultaneous presence and abscense in the world: a testimony that either fails or fulfills itself in human community.

The experience and thought of “God” gives rise to words.   In that, theology is the beginning of a discipline.