Transgressive Devotion

Reviews / Votes

"This is a mesmerising and suggestive book that reworks what it means to be a theologian" -- Pete Ward, Durham University, UK "Transgressive Devotion will take your breath away, at first, but it will return it to you in new form and with new energy, if you follow where it leads. With Wigg-Stevenson as your guide and muse, you're invited on a pilgrimage through (in)famous performance art pieces and real-life theological discussions. By keeping company with others feared and familiar, ancient and contemporary, Wigg-Stevenson seeks to open herself and her readers to new ways of being faithful. Beautifully written, profound, and moving." -- Ellen T. Armour, Vanderbilt Divinity School, USA Gorgeous, moving, and marvelously queering, Wigg-Stevenson's work feels like falling through a series of trap doors located at the foundations of our faith - places of instability that have, until now, been off-limits. The result unfurls a vast, new territory of theological exploration that pushes past constraint and taboo. In this new land, there is room to roam and reconstitute our relationship with God. In language that is precise, poetic, subversive and unflinching, Wigg-Stevenson embraces the invitation of performance art to bump up against the borders of decency. In the process, God is both undone and illuminated; the moralizing, normatively, and assumptions that have so long held theology captive are unbound. An excavation of the author's own landscape of doubt, faith, and ecstasy, the work reveals that the places where theology tears and frays are, in fact, the sites of a live relationship with an untamed God. Here, the old, old story can, as it should, cause us to tremble. -- Emily Scott, Pastor, Dreams and Visions, Baltimore Certainly it can seem that performance art is now an old and institutionalised form without the scope it once had for failure, and for transgression, to which we are all latecomers, participating in awkward re-enactments or studying footage. Perhaps this sense of belatedness, or rather of being both too late and too early, is what makes Wigg-Stevenson's comparison so compelling. -- Rey Conquer, Journal of Art and Christianity