My dissertation affirms and seeks to build upon the “turn to practices” in contemporary theological discourse and praxis by critically examining how we conceive of growth temporally and conceptually, honing in on the theme of formation, wherein practices function in the service of growth towards a particular telos. I argue that leading scholarship addressing formation theologically and methodologically (focusing particularly on the work of Sarah Coakley and Stanley Hauerwas) operates with an account of futurity—a teleology of success grounded in a linear, narrative account of subject-formation—that stands in tension with this scholarship’s commitments to “un-mastery” and attention/openness to “the other,” and undermines its very aims of liberation and flourishing.

Poststructuralist philosophy, like theology, has turned to practices as a generative resource for reflection and/on formation—of the self, of communities, and of discourse itself—and is similarly concerned with freedom and critical of modes of mastery and power. In my project, then, poststructuralism serves as a rubric and resource through which to interrogate and refine theo-methodological reflection on formation. Placing feminist and queer poststructuralist insights on the subjugating effects of subject formation (identity) via the constitutions of social norms (space) and ideals (time) alongside theological reflections on these themes (anthropology, ethics, eschatology, turning especially to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr) this project argues for a theological and methodological account of formation that approaches the future not by asking “how do we secure or obtain it?” but rather “who are the ‘we’ that make up and enact it?”