The Virtue of Not Quite Being at Home

Hanna Reichel learned early on the various forms that ministry can take: their parents worked, at times, as congregational ministers, and spiritual counselors, in international ecumenical bodies and in policy and advocacy. This work brought Reichel’s family all over the world and, after graduating high school, Reichel, too, wanted to live a life of service. They spent a year working with a network of grassroots organizations in Argentina, but they quickly had a tough wake-up call. “I wanted to give back and do something good, but soon realized that I was actually receiving more than I was giving,” they say. “The people I worked with were living in the most precarious situations and taking the time and energy to teach me.” At the same time, Reichel was disheartened by the church’s ambivalence in the face of the country’s dictatorship. Suffice it to say, Reichel came back from that experience very changed.

They started asking questions about God and justice. “Faith, for me, has always been the language with which to make sense of the world, and the ecumenical church was my site of commitment to a better world in full solidarity with this present one,” they say. “Through my life, I was uprooted many times but also had the opportunities to see many different contexts. I was a foreigner immersed in different cultures and languages; I was a foreigner in my assigned gender; I was not quite at home in any of the worlds I passed through.” This experience of not quite being at home fueled a lot of questioning. Turning it into a virtue, Reichel eventually turned it into a career.

One avenue of questioning Reichel has developed as associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary is explored in a course called Theologies of Order and Chaos. “They’re abstract terms, but we assign implicit values to each,” they say. People who have experienced the fragility of life may see God in order, and threat in chaos. On the other hand, people who have not been afforded to flourish by the dominant culture may see order as oppressive and find God at work in disruption. Experiences with order and chaos inform how people theologically conceptualize creation and eschatology, community, and justice. “Understanding experiential backgrounds and commitments helps one appreciate the work of differing theologies, even where we disagree,” Reichel says.

For Reichel, promise lies in queer theology—which finds God outside the confines of our categories, in deep solidarity with human beings who struggle to belong—as well as in “citizen theology,” which is based on the concept of citizen science and enlists non-academics and different communities to contribute to the theological conversation. “Marginalized knowledge helps expose the cracks in a system,” Reichel says. “While fields like feminist theology and liberation theology have been important in challenging theological frameworks, we must go further in questioning the power structure and implicit assumptions under which that conversation is had.” Learn more about Reichel’s upcoming book here.