Unrepressing the Kingdom: Pastoral Theology as Aesthetic Imagination

This essay draws from Jesus’ convictions, expressed in the Gospel of Luke and elsewhere, that the kingdom of God is to be found within and among persons and is epitomized in the lives of infants and young children. It locates children’s intuitions of the kingdom in their aesthetic sensibilities and capacity for artistic abandon, and considers possible psychosocial mechanisms, especially psychoanalytic conceptualizations of repression and its consequences for honest self-expression, by which these intuitions and sensibilities become displaced over time. It conceives of pastoral theology, like psychotherapy and the arts, as an heroic effort to unearth repressed shame and desire, i.e., to find language for what matters most, in service to recovering childlike attunement to the beauty of God’s kingdom.