Placing humans and non-humans in a trinitarian and geographical dynamic: Colin Gunton and Bruno Latour on nature, society, and modernity

Abstract

This thesis is centrally concerned to provide a detailed theological and interdisciplinary account of how the dynamic relationality between humans and nonhumans may be registered and accounted for in a Trinitarian and geographical framework. The method of this study is to establish a mutually critical and enlightening conversation between the fields of Trinitarian theology, science studies, and human geography. The thesis then takes as its primary interlocutors Trinitarian theologian Colin E. Gunton, and science studies theoretician Bruno Latour. A detailed discussion of each author's respective diagnoses of the Enlightenment's cultural, philosophical and theological fallout is offered. The study lends particular focus to the way in which each interlocutor has detailed the modern movement to fragment or distance the realms of God, humans, and nonhumans. Further in this vein, the study then moves to consider a critical comparison of each author's respective positive programs - 'Trinitarianism' and 'nonmodernism' respectively - for navigating our way out ofthe many pitfalls of modern thought.The study concludes with an attempt to bring the insights of Gunton's Trinitarian thought and Latour's 'nonmodern' project into conversation with the human geographical concept of place/placing. Here it is argued that a theological adoption of the geographical concept of place/placing would allow for a more detailed account of nonhuman participation in sociality, nonhuman agency/actancy, and nonhuman participation in human personhood. The culmination ofthese efforts is to be found in the construction of a specifically Trinitarian theo-geographical concept of place/placing that would allow for a theology capable of more fully registering the dynamic relationality that exists between persons and things, humans and nonhumans, culture and nature. By engaging Trinitarian theology in a mutually critical conversation with the fields of science studies and human geography, it is argued that we are better able to construct a distinctly theological means of registering the deep relationality that exists between humans and the multiplicity of nonhumans with whom we share a common world.