After Deconstruction: Re-membering an Ecology of Shalom
Introduction… “I think I’m Deconstructing”
She knew the stories before she learned to read. Noah’s ark hung above her crib. Bible verses adorned the hallway. Sundays meant polished shoes, potlucks after church, and adults who sincerely believed they were teaching her to love God. She loved them. She trusted them. She wanted, more than anything, to become the kind of Christian they hoped she would be.
So she did everything right.
She memorized Scripture, attended every youth retreat, prayed the sinner’s prayer more than once—just to be certain—and learned the subtle art of giving the correct answers before she had fully formed her own questions. Faith, she was told, meant certainty. Obedience. Unwavering conviction. She tried with all her heart to believe what she had inherited.
Yet something never quite fit.
The God proclaimed from the pulpit was said to love the whole world, yet the circle of belonging seemed remarkably small. Friends disappeared after coming out. Difficult questions were met with rehearsed certainties. Compassion often seemed to end where ideological boundaries began. She found herself wondering whether love was truly as expansive as Jesus made it appear.
She kept those questions mostly to herself. Then the fractures widened.
History complicated the stories she had been told. New friendships gave faces to people she had only known as theological categories. She discovered voices from the margins of Christian traditions—voices that often sounded more like Jesus than some of the ones she heard every Sunday.
Still, she stayed. She believed honest questions could strengthen faith.
Then came the years when crosses stood beside political banners, when neighbors became enemies, and when people who had taught her the way of Jesus increasingly defended exclusion, conspiracy, and racial resentment as though they were marks of Christian faithfulness. Watching those she had trusted drift toward Christian nationalism—and in some cases openly embrace white supremacist ideas—did not simply challenge her politics. It shattered her confidence that the world she had inherited could bear the fruit Jesus had promised.
She did not set out to lose her faith. She set out to tell herself the truth.
What followed was not a rejection of God so much as the slow unraveling of an inherited worldview that could no longer hold together. Deconstruction arrived less as a decision than as grief. One certainty after another gave way, until she no longer knew what remained.
And yet, something unexpected emerged from the rubble.
Without the exhausting work of defending inherited certainties, she began to notice the world differently. She listened more carefully. She befriended people she had once been taught to fear. She found herself lingering in forests, sharing meals with neighbors, sitting in silence, reading poets alongside theologians, volunteering in her community, and discovering that compassion expanded as certainty diminished.
She had never felt more alive. She had never felt more alone.
The church no longer felt like home. Yet neither did gatherings whose primary convening practice was criticizing the church. She had no desire to rebuild the old house with stronger walls or better arguments. What she longed for was something she did not yet have words for: a community where belonging preceded agreement, where questions were welcomed as signs of faith rather than threats to it, where the flourishing of neighbors, strangers, and the earth itself mattered as much as right belief.
She had found herself.
Now she wondered whether there were others searching not merely for new ideas, but for a new way of belonging.
Part I — What Is Happening?
Diagnosing the Age of Deconstruction
The Age of Deconstruction
During the past three decades, I have lost count of the number of conversations that have begun with a similar, often hesitant confession.
“I think I’m deconstructing.”
The speaker is rarely who outsiders might imagine. Sometimes it is a theology student sensing there is more to life and spirituality than their inherited doctrines offer. Sometimes it is a retired pastor quietly acknowledging doubts that have remained hidden for decades. Sometimes it is a therapist attempting to disentangle faith from shame. And these courageous truth tellers are fundamentalists, progressives, and those in-between. More often than not, it is someone who has faithfully inhabited Christian communities for years, only to discover that the theological architecture sustaining their system of belief no longer bears the weight of lived experience.
Contrary to popular caricature, these conversations seldom begin in anger. They often begin in grief.
The grief is rarely over the loss of belief itself. Rather, it is the sorrow of discovering that the forms of Christianity one inherited cannot adequately account for reality as it is encountered. At times, it’s a kind of sadness at feeling dupped by the very people they admired and looked to as guides. Experiences of ecclesial abuse, historical criticism, scientific discovery, psychological insight, xenophobia, encounters with religious diversity, growing awareness of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, ecological degradation, or simply prolonged suffering create fractures within theological worlds once assumed to be coherent. The resulting crisis is not fundamentally intellectual. It is existential. Individuals discover that honesty requires questions their communities have neither welcomed nor equipped them to ask.
Practical theology begins not with abstract systems but with attentive engagement to lived experience, seeking wisdom through the reciprocal dialogue between Christian tradition and contemporary life.[1] From that vantage point, deconstruction appears less as an ideological trend than as a widespread spiritual quest for something real. It has become one of the defining spiritual experiences of late modern and postmodern Christianity.
The phenomenon is hardly confined to ecclesial life. Across Western societies, inherited institutions have experienced unprecedented erosion of public trust. Political systems, educational institutions, scientific authorities, media, economic structures, and religious communities alike have become subjects of sustained critique. The grand narratives that once organized modern Western consciousness no longer command universal credibility.[2] What earlier generations largely received as settled truth is increasingly approached with suspicion, critical examination, and historical consciousness.
French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as “Incredulity towards metanarratives” describing a widespread skepticism toward universal, overarching “grand stories.” Straightness is a grand story. Patriarchy is a grand story. Whiteness is a grand story. Consumerism and communism are grand stories. Grand stories colonialize. They enforce a single story.
Within Christianity, this broader cultural shift has assumed distinctive theological forms. Christians increasingly interrogate inherited doctrines concerning biblical authority, gender, sexuality, ecclesial power, divine violence, salvation, hell, and human identity. Many are asking not only whether particular beliefs are true but also whose interests those beliefs have historically served. Such questioning has often been dismissed by ecclesial authorities as evidence of declining faith. Yet this interpretation fails to appreciate that critique itself may arise from profound theological and moral concern rather than unbelief.[3]
Indeed, many of those who identify themselves as “deconstructing” are not abandoning Christianity because they care too little about the gospel, but because they care too deeply to ignore the contradictions they perceive between the life of Jesus and the practices of the institutions that bear Christ’s name. Their questioning frequently emerges not from cynicism but from conscience. The refusal to participate in self-deception may itself constitute an act of faithfulness.
My own theological journey has been deeply shaped by this process. Raised within a conservative evangelicalism with an Anabaptist spin, I inherited theological frameworks that often-equated certainty with faithfulness, a kind of doctrinal exclusion with spiritual maturity, and institutional loyalty with fidelity to Christ. Over time, however, sustained engagement with Scripture, church history, philosophy, psychology, ecological thought, and the testimonies of those marginalized by dominant theological systems rendered such equations increasingly untenable. What unraveled was not faith itself, but particular constructions of faith that could no longer sustain either intellectual integrity or pastoral credibility.
In retrospect, I no longer understand deconstruction primarily as the dismantling of belief. Rather, it is a disciplined practice of truthfulness. It is the difficult and often painful work of exposing theological, cultural, and institutional constructions that have become incapable of mediating the life they were intended to serve. Such work has always belonged to the prophetic vocation of G-d’s[4] peoples. The Hebrew prophets deconstructed Israel’s false securities. Jesus relentlessly deconstructed religious systems that obscured the reign of God. Throughout Christian history, reform movements have repeatedly challenged inherited structures in the name of deeper fidelity to the good news seen in Jesus Christ.[5]
For this reason, the problem confronting contemporary Christianity is not that we have become too skilled at critique. In many respects, deconstruction has been both necessary and profoundly faithful. Exposing abuse, naming systemic injustice, interrogating theological complicity with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, or ecological destruction are indispensable moments toward repentance. Communities incapable of self-critique inevitably drift toward idolatry.
The deeper challenge lies elsewhere.
Again and again, I encounter individuals who possess a sophisticated capacity for dismantling inherited theological worlds yet lack corresponding resources for imagining what faithful life beyond those worlds might become. They know what they can no longer affirm, yet struggle to articulate what they now trust, if anything. They have language for critique but not for communion, for suspicion but not for hope, for dismantling but not for cultivating communities capable of sustaining life.
In short, we have become extraordinarily proficient at deconstruction. Yet, we possess remarkably little theological language for “reconstruction.”
This absence is not simply a conceptual deficiency. It is a pastoral crisis. Without compelling visions of reconstruction, deconstruction easily becomes either perpetual skepticism or nostalgic reaction. Individuals find themselves suspended between worlds—unable to return to inherited certainties, yet unable to imagine forms of Christian life sufficiently robust to inhabit the future.
The argument of this essay is that this impasse arises, in part, because we have misunderstood both deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction was never intended to be a destination. Properly understood, it is a necessary moment within a larger theological movement toward deeper participation in G-d’s reconciling work. The task before practical theology, therefore, is not to reverse deconstruction but to cultivate practices of communal reconstruction capable of nurturing what I will later describe as an ecology of shalom.
Derrida Was Never the Villain
Few philosophical movements have been as simultaneously influential and misunderstood within contemporary Christian discourse as Derridean deconstruction.[6] Within many ecclesial contexts, deconstruction has become shorthand for skepticism, relativism, or the dissolution of faith itself. The term is frequently employed to describe the abandonment of inherited beliefs, ecclesial institutions, or theological convictions, often accompanied by the assumption that Jacques Derrida bears primary intellectual responsibility for this cultural phenomenon. Such a reading, however, obscures both the philosophical aims of Derrida’s project and the ethical commitments that increasingly characterized his later work.
Derrida never proposed deconstruction as an end in itself. Nor did he advocate the destruction of meaning or the impossibility of truth. Rather, deconstruction functions as a disciplined practice of reading that exposes the instability of claims that present themselves as complete, self-grounding, or beyond question. Every system of meaning contains tensions, exclusions, and unacknowledged assumptions that resist closure. Deconstruction therefore interrupts the temptation to absolutize any conceptual system, not because meaning is impossible, but because finite human interpretation can never exhaust reality itself.[7]
Such epistemic humility resonates in unexpected ways with long-standing theological traditions. Christian theology has repeatedly insisted that G-d always exceeds human comprehension. Augustine’s oft-quoted observation that “if you understand it, it is not G-d” captures an apophatic instinct stretching from Gregory of Nyssa through Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa. Derrida’s critique of metaphysical certainty should therefore not be construed primarily as an attack upon theology but as a challenge to every attempt to confuse human interpretations of god with the G-d who is. The object of deconstruction is not transcendence itself but the idolatrous closure of discourse that mistakes finite formulations for ultimate reality.
This distinction becomes particularly significant when considering the theological reception of Derrida through John D. Caputo. More than any other contemporary theologian, Caputo has argued that deconstruction is a vital ethical rather than nihilistic enterprise. Deconstruction, he contends, remains animated by what exceeds every settled structure of thought—what he describes as “the event.”[8] The event names the irreducible arrival of the other, the unforeseen interruption that resists domestication within established conceptual systems. Rather than dissolving responsibility, deconstruction intensifies it by cultivating attentiveness to those persons, experiences, and possibilities excluded by dominant narratives.
Consequently, Caputo reframes deconstruction not as the negation of theology but as a practice of theological repentance. Repentance, in this sense, involves more than moral contrition. It signifies the continual relinquishment of conceptual idols that seek to contain the inexhaustibility of G-d within manageable systems of certainty. Every theological formulation remains provisional before the living reality to which it bears witness. Deconstruction thus serves faith precisely by refusing to permit theology to become idolatry.[9]
Such a reading also illuminates the pastoral realities increasingly encountered within contemporary faith communities. In my accompanying work, I encounter relatively few people are rejecting transcendence altogether. More often, they are questioning inherited images of god that have become morally, psychologically, or existentially untenable. Their crisis frequently concerns not whether G-d exists, but whether the imagination of the divine mediated through particular theological systems adequately reflects the G-d who is, let alone the Divine as made known in Jesus Christ.
Caputo’s theological interpretation also helps illuminate an important continuity between Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, whose work profoundly influenced Derrida, understood critique not as an exercise in destruction but as an act of redemption. An act of love of the real. History, Benjamin argued, is too often narrated by its victors, leaving countless lives, memories, and possibilities buried beneath narratives of inevitable progress. The vocation of critical thought is therefore not simply to dismantle dominant accounts but to recover forgotten fragments that still bear witness to justice.[10]
This concern culminates in Benjamin’s famous image of the Angel of History. Gazing backward, the angel sees what appears to humanity as a sequence of historical events as “one single catastrophe,” a mounting pile of wreckage accumulating before its feet. Yet even amid this devastation, the angel longs to remain, awaken the dead, and “make whole what has been smashed.” A storm called progress, however, relentlessly propels the angel into the future.[11] Benjamin’s image has often been interpreted as one of despair. Yet its deepest impulse is profoundly hopeful. The task of criticism is never merely to add to the rubble but to refuse the forgetting that allows suffering to disappear beneath triumphant narratives.
Benjamin therefore anticipates an insight that becomes increasingly important for both Derrida and Caputo: critique serves an ethical vocation. The exposure of false certainties is undertaken not for its own sake but because justice requires remembering those whom certainty excludes. Deconstruction, in this light, becomes an act of fidelity toward those rendered invisible by dominant theological, political, or cultural systems. It clears conceptual space where forgotten voices, neglected histories, and unforeseen possibilities may once again be encountered.
Richard Kearney extends this trajectory in a more explicitly theological direction…
This observation finds important resonance in Richard Kearney’s proposal of anatheism, the “return to God after God.”[12] Kearney argues that authentic faith frequently emerges only after the collapse of the “god” constructed through cultural certainty, ideological projection, or institutional power. The death experienced within deconstruction need not therefore signify the death of god; rather, it may signal the necessary relinquishment of idols masquerading as god. Faith, paradoxically, often becomes possible only after certainty has become impossible.
Kearney’s proposal bears striking pastoral significance. The individuals who quietly confess over coffee, “I am deconstructing,” rarely describe an intentional abandonment of faith. Instead, they recount the painful recognition that inherited theological constructions have become incapable of sustaining intellectual integrity, moral credibility, or spiritual flourishing. The object of deconstruction is frequently not the Jesus Way itself but particular ecclesial expressions of Christianity whose assumptions have become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the expansive hospitality of the gospel.
From this perspective, deconstruction appears less as an adversary of faith in Christ than as a recurring moment within its own histories. The biblical narrative repeatedly bears witness to prophetic disruptions of religious certainty. Israel’s prophets expose the idols hidden within temple worship, monarchy, and national identity. Jesus continually unsettles theological systems that privilege purity over mercy, exclusion over hospitality, or institutional preservation over the flourishing of persons. The Christian traditions have never advanced solely through preservation; it has also advanced through continual repentance, reform, and reformation.
The contemporary phenomenon of deconstruction therefore should not be interpreted simply as evidence of cultural secularization or philosophical relativism. It may equally be understood as an expression of profound moral seriousness—a refusal to confuse inherited constructions with the living reality of G-d. Deconstruction exposes the insufficiency of conceptual systems precisely because justice, hospitality, forgiveness, and love continually exceed the boundaries we construct around them. Derrida himself repeatedly insisted that justice is never fully present within existing legal systems but always remains “to come” (à venir), calling every established order toward greater faithfulness.[13] Hospitality similarly remains impossible whenever the stranger is welcomed only according to conditions already determined by the host.[14]
Read together, Derrida, Caputo, Benjamin, and Kearney reveal a remarkably consistent ethical imagination. Deconstruction is not the celebration of collapse. It is the disciplined refusal to mistake our systems for reality, our doctrines for G-d, or our institutions for the kin-dom they seek to witness. It exposes idols because idols always obstruct love. It interrupts certainty because certainty so often silences the stranger. It gathers forgotten fragments because justice remembers what triumphal histories forget.
Yet these thinkers also expose a striking absence within much contemporary Christianity. While churches have become increasingly adept at resisting deconstruction, they have devoted comparatively less attention to the practices by which communities learn to live faithfully after inherited certainties have been relinquished. Deconstruction may reveal the fractures within our theological worlds, but it cannot by itself teach us how to inhabit the world anew.
It is here, I wish to suggest, that practical theology has a distinctive contribution to make. If deconstruction uncovers the fragments, reconstruction becomes the communal work of re-membering them—patiently weaving lives, communities, traditions, and creation itself into what I will later describe as an ecology of shalom.
Part II — What Does It Mean?
Interpreting Deconstruction
Deconstruction as Individuation
If deconstruction describes what occurs philosophically when inherited structures of meaning become unstable, psychology offers a complementary account of what is happening within the person. What countless people now call “deconstruction” often resembles what depth psychologists have long understood as individuation—the lifelong movement toward becoming a differentiated, integrated self-capable of genuine relationship rather than unconscious conformity. Read through this lens, deconstruction is not merely an intellectual critique of doctrines or institutions. It is the arduous psychological and spiritual work of becoming a person.
This reframing is significant because it shifts the conversation from belief revision to human development. The question is no longer simply What doctrines have I rejected? but Who am I becoming?
Carl Jung described individuation as the process through which a person gradually distinguishes the authentic self from the social persona and the collective expectations that have previously governed identity. The task is not radical individualism but increasing wholeness—a movement toward greater psychological integration in which unconscious fears, desires, and projections are brought into conscious relationship rather than allowed to direct one’s life unnoticed.[15] Individuation is therefore always unsettling. It requires relinquishing identities that once provided security but now inhibit maturity.
Many contemporary experiences of religious deconstruction bear precisely these characteristics. The inherited theological system no longer coheres. Questions previously forbidden become unavoidable. Doubts emerge not because one desires unbelief but because reality itself refuses to fit inherited explanations. Former certainties lose their explanatory power. What previously functioned as unquestioned truth becomes visible as a historically situated construction.
James Hollis extends Jung’s insights into adulthood by arguing that genuine maturity always involves separating one’s life from the unconscious expectations inherited from family, culture, and institutions. The central developmental question becomes deceptively simple: Whose life am I living?[16]Much of adult suffering, Hollis suggests, arises because people continue performing scripts they never consciously chose. These scripts often masquerade as virtue, duty, or faithfulness while quietly alienating persons from their deepest vocation.
Within many forms of Christianity, these inherited scripts are profoundly theological. One learns not only doctrines but emotional reflexes: which questions are dangerous, whose authority must never be challenged, which identities belong inside the community and which remain outside, what forms of certainty are rewarded, and what fears sustain communal cohesion. These patterns are frequently experienced not merely as beliefs but as conditions of belonging. To question them can feel like risking the loss of family, community, or even god.
Consequently, religious deconstruction frequently involves more than revising theological propositions. It invites disentangling one’s sense of self from systems of attachment that have become fused with one’s experience of the sacred. What is being deconstructed is not only theology but identity itself.
Donald Winnicott’s distinction between the false self and the true self further illuminates this process. According to Winnicott, the false self develops as an adaptive strategy whereby individuals organize themselves around external expectations rather than authentic experience.[17] Such adaptation is initially necessary for survival, particularly within environments where acceptance depends upon compliance. Yet over time, excessive accommodation produces a profound estrangement from one’s own vitality.
Many former evangelicals describe precisely this experience. They recount years of performing “certainty” while privately carrying unresolved questions, suppressing aspects of identity to maintain belonging, or inhabiting religious roles that no longer corresponded to lived experience. The resulting deconstruction is therefore less a rejection of faith than the gradual collapse of an unsustainable false self. What appears externally as rebellion may internally constitute a courageous act of psychological honesty.
Jessica Benjamin deepens this account by emphasizing that mature identity is fundamentally relational rather than autonomous. Human flourishing arises not through domination or fusion but through mutual recognition, the capacity to acknowledge both oneself and another as distinct centers of agency and subjectivity.[18] The deepest failures of human relationships occur when one party must dominate, absorb, or erase the other’s subjectivity in order to preserve its own coherence.
Jessica Benjamin’s insight has profound theological implications. Many authoritarian religious systems function precisely through asymmetrical recognition. The institution recognizes persons only insofar as they conform. Difference is experienced as threat rather than gift. Questions become disloyalty. Ambiguity becomes unbelief. Submission becomes the primary virtue. Such systems frequently produce compliance, but they rarely cultivate mature persons capable of reciprocal relationship.
Seen from this perspective, deconstruction becomes an act of reclaiming subjectivity. It is the painful insistence that one’s own experience, conscience, questions, and encounters with reality must be granted legitimacy rather than perpetually subordinated to institutional certainty. Psychological differentiation therefore becomes a necessary precondition for authentic communion.
This insight also clarifies why deconstruction extends far beyond religion. The process frequently involves differentiating oneself from inherited systems of meaning wherever they exercise unconscious control. Family systems may shape patterns of anxiety or emotional fusion. Nationalism may conflate divine purposes with political identity. Racism normalizes distorted hierarchies of human worth. Patriarchy distributes authority according to gendered assumptions rather than mutual flourishing. Capitalism often reduces persons to productivity, consumption, and economic value. None of these systems merely informs thought; each forms identity.
To differentiate from such systems is not necessarily to abandon every inherited tradition. Rather, it is to recover the capacity to engage them freely instead of unconsciously. Individuation does not abolish belonging. It transforms belonging from coercion into choice.
Here the distinction between deconstruction and reconstruction becomes especially important. Individuation is necessarily differentiating. One must become sufficiently separate to discover one’s own voice. Yet psychological development does not culminate in permanent separation. The differentiated self eventually returns to relationship, now capable of participation without fusion and intimacy without domination.
This observation suggests a constructive theological proposal. Perhaps deconstruction functions psychologically as individuation. It names the developmental process through which persons differentiate themselves from inherited identities, unconscious loyalties, and systems of domination that no longer permit authentic flourishing. It is therefore not primarily a crisis of belief but a crisis of becoming.
Yet individuation is never its own end. The differentiated self ultimately seeks renewed participation in communities capable of honoring mutual recognition, shared discernment, and reciprocal love. The goal is not isolated authenticity but relational maturity. One departs in order to return differently.
This developmental account also explains why so many people emerge from deconstruction with both grief and gratitude. The traditions they leave often genuinely nurtured them while simultaneously constraining them. Individuation requires neither romanticizing nor demonizing the past. It asks instead whether inherited forms still serve life or whether fidelity now requires transformation.
The challenge before practical theology, therefore, is not simply helping individuals dismantle inadequate theological worlds. It is accompanying them through the difficult passage from unconscious conformity toward differentiated participation within communities capable of sustaining mature, relational, and life-giving faith. Such communities become not places where individuation is feared but where it is welcomed as one of the Spirit’s ordinary means of forming persons into the image of Christ.
Why Individuation Isn’t Enough
If deconstruction can be understood psychologically as a process of individuation, then an equally important question follows: What comes after differentiation? Individuation, as articulated by C. G. Jung and developed by later depth psychologists, offers a compelling account of how persons disentangle themselves from inherited identities, unconscious projections, and systems of domination. Yet individuation, by itself, cannot tell us what we are becoming for. It teaches us how to separate, but not necessarily how to belong.
This, I suggest, is where many contemporary narratives of deconstruction stall.
Having disentangled themselves from fundamentalism, patriarchy, nationalism, racism, or other inherited structures, many discover that freedom alone is insufficient. The question quietly changes. It is no longer simply, What must I leave behind? but To whom—and with whom—am I now becoming?
The movement from deconstruction to reconstruction therefore requires more than psychological development. It requires a richer account of reality itself.
The Event Beyond the Self
John D. Caputo has consistently argued that Derrida’s project has been profoundly misunderstood. Deconstruction was never an invitation to nihilism or endless skepticism. Rather, it is animated by what Caputo calls the event—an unforeseeable call that exceeds every concept, doctrine, institution, or identity. The event is not something we master intellectually; it interrupts us ethically. It unsettles settled worlds so that justice, hospitality, forgiveness, and love may arrive anew.[19]
For Caputo, deconstruction is therefore never an end in itself. Its purpose is not destruction but openness. Every deconstruction loosens the grip of idols so that we might become more responsive to the vulnerable call of the other.
Significantly, however, the event is never merely private.
The call comes through neighbors, strangers, enemies, refugees, wounded ecosystems, forgotten histories, and marginalized communities. One never deconstructs solely for oneself. One is deconstructed by encounters that expose the limits of one’s existing world.
Caputo’s theological reading thus establishes the ethical trajectory of deconstruction, but he intentionally resists constructing a comprehensive ontology. He tells us why we are called beyond ourselves but less about how human beings actually become capable of living into that call.
It is precisely here that Gilbert Simondon becomes an indispensable conversation partner.
Simondon & the Ontology of Becoming Together
Gilbert Simondon challenged one of the defining assumptions of Western philosophy: that individuals exist prior to relationships. Instead, Simondon argued that individuals emerge through ongoing processes of individuation within dynamic fields of relation. The individual is never the origin of social life but one moment within a much larger process of becoming.[20]
For Simondon, individuation is never complete. Every person retains what he calls a preindividual reserve—an inexhaustible surplus of unrealized potential that remains available for future transformation. Human beings are therefore permanently unfinished, continually becoming through new encounters, communities, and environments.[21]
Most importantly, authentic individuation naturally gives rise to what Simondon names transindividuality. One does not become oneself by escaping relationships but by participating more deeply within them. The fullest realization of personhood is not autonomy but shared becoming.
This insight fundamentally reframes reconstruction.
Reconstruction is not the rebuilding of isolated belief systems after inherited certainties collapse. It is participation in new forms of communal becoming. One does not simply reconstruct ideas. One reconstructs worlds.
Bernard Stiegler: Technics and Shared Formation
Bernard Stiegler extends Simondon’s ontology into the technological conditions of late modernity. Human beings, Stiegler argues, have always become through technical mediation. Language, writing, books, architecture, digital media, artificial intelligence, and social networks are not neutral tools external to humanity. They actively participate in the formation of consciousness itself.[22]
This observation has profound implications for contemporary deconstruction.
Very few people now deconstruct alone.
Their questions emerge through podcasts, online communities, YouTube channels, Substack essays, Reddit discussions, TikTok creators, and countless digital conversations. The process itself has become technologically mediated.
Yet Stiegler simultaneously warns that the contemporary attention economy increasingly produces what he calls disindividuation—the erosion rather than the maturation of human persons. Digital platforms often reward immediacy over reflection, reaction over discernment, outrage over wisdom, and perpetual critique over communal repair.[23]
The result is a subtle paradox.
The same technological networks that enable people to escape abusive systems may also trap them within economies of endless suspicion. Algorithms reward deconstruction. They rarely reward reconciliation.
Kenneth Gergen & the Relational Self
Kenneth Gergen’s relational social constructionism provides an important psychological complement to these philosophical insights. Rejecting the modern image of an autonomous individual, Gergen argues that identity itself emerges through relationships. The self is not the origin of dialogue but its ongoing accomplishment. Meaning resides less within isolated minds than within the relational processes through which persons continually constitute one another.[24]
Such a perspective resonates remarkably well with Christian theological anthropology.
Human beings do not first become individuals who later choose community. Rather, persons are called into existence through webs of relationship—with parents, neighbors, strangers, traditions, ecosystems, and ultimately with the Creator. No one becomes human alone.
Taken together, Caputo, Simondon, Stiegler, and Gergen suggest that reconstruction cannot simply mean rebuilding private belief systems after the collapse of inherited certainties.
- Caputo reminds us that deconstruction opens us to the event.
- Simondon shows that becoming is always transindividual.
- Stiegler demonstrates that this becoming is technologically mediated.
- Gergen reveals that identity itself is relational before it is individual.
Together they expose the inadequacy of both modern individualism and authoritarian collectivism. Neither isolated autonomy nor enforced conformity constitutes genuine flourishing. Instead, persons become more fully themselves precisely as they participate in communities where the flourishing of each contributes to the flourishing of all.
Part III — Where Are We Going?
Toward an Ecology of Shalom
Here the Apostle Paul’s image of the body of Christ assumes renewed significance. Diversity is not overcome by communion; it is sustained through communion. The eye requires the hand precisely because each remains irreducibly distinct (1 Cor. 12). Likewise, Randy Woodley reminds us that shalom is never merely personal peace but the right ordering of relationships among G-d, neighbor, self, and the whole community of creation.[25] Flourishing is ecological before it is individual. Perhaps, then, reconstruction is best understood not as recovering certainty but as re-membering.
Not remembering nostalgically.
But re-membering what fragmentation has dismembered.
Gathering scattered lives into communities capable of sustaining genuine difference without domination, genuine freedom without isolation, and genuine belonging without uniformity. If deconstruction names the courage to leave oppressive systems, reconstruction names the equally necessary courage to belong again. Not to the same systems. But to new ecologies of grace.
Communities where differentiated persons continually become together as participants in G-d’s unfolding work of shalom.
Reconstruction as Re-membering
The vocabulary of reconstruction has become almost axiomatic within communities emerging from religious deconstruction. Afterall, isn’t reconstruction the natural step after deconstruction. It appears almost self-evident. Once inherited beliefs have been dismantled, one naturally assumes that new beliefs must be constructed in their place. Yet the metaphor deserves greater scrutiny.
Do NOT rush into reconstruction!
Construction implies fabrication. It evokes the work of architects, engineers, and builders who assemble discrete materials into a newly designed structure. Within the modern imagination, reconstruction therefore privileges intentionality, mastery, and individual agency. One reconstructs oneself through careful selection, rational reflection, and personal choice.
Such language, however, inadequately describes the experience of many who have journeyed through deconstruction. Over more than three decades accompanying individuals as a pastor, spiritual director, and teacher of practical theology, I have rarely witnessed people intentionally constructing a replacement worldview or designing a new identity. More often, I have observed a slower, less controllable, and ultimately more grace-filled process. As inherited certainties collapse, people frequently discover that the deepest work is not one of self-construction but of being re-membered. What had been fractured by trauma, shame, fear, ideology, or exclusion is slowly gathered into a renewed coherence. Long-neglected dimensions of the self are welcomed rather than suppressed. Painful histories are neither erased nor allowed to define the future but are woven into a larger story of healing. Relationships once marked by suspicion become spaces of trust. Neighbors become companions. Creation becomes kin. Even G-d is encountered anew—not as the guarantor of certainty or the architect of an improved belief system, but as the One who lovingly and patiently gathers what the powers of sin, violence, and fragmentation have sought to scatter.
This shift in agency is theologically significant. The modern mind often assumes that reconstruction is something we accomplish through sufficient insight, effort, determination, or prayer. The Jesus traditions offer a different imagination. We do not ultimately reconstruct ourselves. We are re-membered. The Divine revealed in Jesus Christ is always gathering what has been divided, reconciling what has been estranged, and restoring communion where dismemberment has prevailed. The movement beyond deconstruction is therefore less accurately described as reconstruction than as re-membering—our participation in G-d’s ongoing work of making one body from lives, communities, and indeed a creation that have been scattered by fear and held together again by love.
The ordinary English verb to remember carries a layered theological richness. Beyond recalling something forgotten, the word also suggests re-membering: the gathering together of that which has become dis-membered. The opposite of remembering is therefore not merely forgetting. It is fragmentation. It is the separation of what properly belongs together.
This language of dismemberment provides a fruitful theological lens through which to understand both personal and cultural experience. Trauma dismembers. Colonization dismembers. Racism dismembers. Patriarchy dismembers. Fundamentalism dismembers. Consumer capitalism likewise fragments persons into isolated producers and consumers, severing identity from community and vocation from place. At the personal level, shame frequently divides individuals against themselves, estranging body from spirit, emotion from intellect, memory from hope. The result is not simply mistaken belief but fractured existence.
Psychology has long described such phenomena in terms of dissociation, fragmentation, and the multiplicity of the self. Yet theology possesses an even older vocabulary. Sin itself may be understood as a condition of disordered relationship—a rupture of communion with G-d, neighbor, creation, and one’s own deepest self. Consequently, Christian hope cannot be adequately described as the acquisition of correct beliefs. Salvation concerns the restoration of communion. G-d’s redemptive work is fundamentally integrative before it is informational.
The Scriptures consistently narrate precisely such a movement. Israel’s history unfolds through exile and gathering, scattering and return. The prophets envision G-d assembling dispersed peoples into a renewed covenant community. The New Testament extends this imagery through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, culminating in Pentecost, where scattered languages become the very medium of communion rather than its obstacle. The biblical story repeatedly resists the assumption that redemption consists primarily in escape from the world or the perfection of isolated individuals. Instead, the Divine continually gathers what violence, fear, and empire have scattered.[26]
The Apostle Paul’s image of the church as the Body of Christ offers perhaps the most profound expression of this theological vision.[27] Bodies are not collections of interchangeable components but living organisms composed of differentiated members whose flourishing depends upon mutual participation. Diversity is therefore not the threat to the body… dismemberment is.
Paul’s metaphor carries implications extending well beyond ecclesiology. Human flourishing itself is fundamentally relational. Persons do not become whole through increasing autonomy but through rightly ordered participation within relationships of mutual gift and reception. This insight resonates with relational accounts of personhood in which being is constituted through communion rather than secured through self-sufficient individuality.[28] To belong is not an accidental feature of creaturely existence; it is an ontological vocation.
This insight also reframes the meaning of healing after deconstruction. Healing is not the elimination of previously rejected selves. The frightened child, the overachieving perfectionist, the vigilant protector, the grieving mourner, and the questioning theologian are not enemies to be conquered. Rather, each represents an aspect of one’s history that seeks reintegration within a larger communion. The goal is not psychological uniformity but relational coherence. Wholeness emerges not through the domination of competing internal voices but through their reconciliation within a more hospitable self.
Such reconciliation rarely occurs through argument alone. It is cultivated through practices that patiently restore belonging: communities gathered around shared meals; friendships marked by truthful presence; spiritual direction; therapy; neighborhood participation; ecological restoration; hospitality extended to strangers; worship; silence; lament; and Eucharist. These practices do not merely transmit new ideas. They enact new relationships. They become embodied disciplines of re-membering.
The Eucharist, in particular, stands at the theological center of this proposal. Christian tradition has often understood the sacrament as an act of remembrance. Yet remembrance here exceeds cognitive recollection. At the table, Christ’s broken body becomes the means through which fragmented lives are gathered into communion. Separate individuals become members of one body.[29] The Eucharist therefore performs what it proclaims. It re-members.
This sacramental vision suggests that reconstruction is not principally an individual achievement but an communal gift. Persons do not finally heal themselves any more than isolated limbs restore themselves to a living body. They are received into communities in which mutual belonging gradually becomes possible. The church at its best does not manufacture certainty. It cultivates communion. Its vocation is not the preservation of ideological uniformity but participation in the Creator’s reconciling work of gathering together all that has been scattered.
This account of ecclesial belonging must nevertheless remain alert to the ways Christian communities themselves have practiced dismemberment. Churches have frequently confused unity with conformity, communion with assimilation, and orthodoxy with the preservation of dominant social arrangements. Willie James Jennings’s critique of Western Christian formation is especially relevant here: Christian institutions have often educated persons into possessive individualism and racialized belonging rather than into lives of mutual receptivity.[30] Re-membering therefore cannot mean an uncritical return to ecclesial structures that produced fragmentation in the first place. It requires communities capable of repentance, truthful memory, and the cultivation of forms of belonging not ordered by domination.
For this reason, the prefix re- must not be interpreted as a simple recovery of the past. To be re-membered is not to be returned unchanged to the communities, doctrines, or identities from which one has become estranged. Nor is it to suppress the insights gained through deconstruction. Re-membering is transformative retrieval. It gathers what has been severed while refusing to reinstall the conditions that caused the severing. It seeks communion without demanding sameness and continuity without denying rupture.
Put simply, reconstruction as re-membering is NOT a bathroom remodel. It is not replacing an old leaking tap for newer better faucet, nor swapping out an avocado-colored bathtub for a walk in marble shower. Deconstruction clears to make space for the real to reveal itself. Re-membering prefigures ecology.
Imagine the citizens of Jerusalem standing before the heap of stones left by Babylon. A reconstruction proposal says, “Let us rebuild the wall, only higher and thicker, so we will never again be vulnerable.” While a re-membering imagination might kneel beside the same rubble wondering, “What if these stones could do something they have never done before? What if they redirected the river back into the valley, held the soil for orchards, formed benches around communal tables, or became shelters for those with no home?” The first response preserves the memory of fear by reinforcing it an architecture of fear of the other. The second re-members the community by redistributing the very materials of its trauma into practices of shared life. One doubles down on the old narrative with stronger defenses. The other composes an entirely new more Shalomic story from the same stones. Re-memberinng.
This proposal also challenges one of the enduring assumptions of modern Western individualism. Reconstruction language often imagines autonomous selves independently constructing meaningful identities from the fragments of inherited traditions. Such imagery inadvertently reproduces the very modern assumptions that deconstruction sought to expose. Christian theology offers a fundamentally different account of personhood. We do not first exist as isolated individuals who later choose community. Rather, we become persons through participation in communities of love.
Indigenous theological accounts of shalom deepen this claim by locating human personhood within a broader community of creation. Randy Woodley describes shalom not as private tranquility but as the flourishing of a network of rightly related beings.[31] From this perspective, dismemberment includes not only estrangement among human persons but also the severing of humanity from land, creatures, place, and the reciprocal relations that sustain life. Re-membering must therefore be ecological as well as psychological and ecclesial.
For this reason, I propose that the movement beyond deconstruction is neither the recovery of former certainties nor the construction of novel identities. It is participation in G-d’s ongoing work of re-membering. The Spirit continually gathers what fear has divided, reconciles what violence has estranged, heals what shame has fragmented, and restores what empire has scattered. Divine redemption is therefore less analogous to architecture than to healing, less concerned with constructing new edifices than with restoring living bodies to communion.
This reconciling movement is grounded in a relational understanding of Divine love. If creation exists through G-d’s noncoercive, self-giving love rather than through unilateral domination, then creaturely becoming is always participatory. Thomas Jay Oord’s theology of love is significant here because it depicts divine action as relationally empowering rather than controlling.[32] G-d does not re-member creation by overriding creaturely agency but by calling, luring, and empowering creatures toward renewed relations of love.
Such communion extends beyond humanity alone. If the biblical vision culminates, as Paul declares, in the reconciliation of “all things” in Christ,[33] then re-membering ultimately encompasses the whole creation. Human beings are restored not merely to themselves or to one another but to the wider community of life from which modernity has so often estranged us. Reconstruction therefore gives way to a richer theological imagination: an ecology of communion in which persons, communities, and creation are gradually re-membered into the peaceable life of the Three-and-One.
An Ecology of Shalom
If deconstruction functions as a necessary process of differentiation, and reconstruction names the communal work of re-membering persons into relationships of belonging, then the horizon toward which reconstruction moves requires a richer theological imagination than personal wholeness alone. The biblical vision of shalom offers precisely such an imagination. Yet within much contemporary Christian discourse, shalom is frequently reduced to an inner state of tranquility, interpersonal harmony, or social justice narrowly conceived. While each of these dimensions participates in biblical peace, none exhausts its meaning. Shalom is not principally the experience of the peaceful individual. Rather, shalom names the flourishing ecology of rightly ordered relationships in which persons, communities, creatures, and creation participate together in G-d’s ongoing work of life-giving communion. It is less a destination than an ever-deepening pattern of relational becoming.
This ecological vision requires moving beyond the modern imagination of the autonomous self. Western Christianity has often inherited the assumptions of Enlightenment individualism, imagining salvation as the rescue of discrete persons whose spiritual maturity culminates in private reconciliation with god. Such assumptions subtly shape even contemporary discussions of reconstruction. After deconstruction, individuals seek a healthier faith, a more authentic identity, or a more coherent spirituality. These aspirations are not insignificant, but they remain incomplete if they fail to recognize that persons never exist apart from the relational matrices that continually constitute them.
Willie James Jennings has demonstrated that Christian imagination itself was profoundly distorted through the colonial project, where identity became detached from place, people, and creaturely belonging. Colonial Christianity fragmented relationships that Scripture consistently holds together, replacing shared participation within creation with systems of possession, hierarchy, and racialized separation. Jennings therefore argues that Christian formation must recover the intimate belonging between people, land, and God that characterized Israel’s vocation and reaches its fulfillment in Christ.[34] Reconstruction, therefore, cannot simply rebuild individual belief systems. It must participate in healing the fractures colonial modernity has inscribed upon human and ecological relationships alike. It must re-member.
Randy Woodley similarly insists that shalom cannot be understood apart from what he names the Harmony Way. Drawing upon Indigenous wisdom and biblical theology, Woodley argues that harmony is not the absence of conflict but the continual cultivation of balanced relationships among Creator, humanity, and the wider community of creation.[35] Such harmony is dynamic rather than static. It resembles the ongoing adjustments of a healthy ecosystem more than the rigid equilibrium imagined by mechanistic models of order. Every relationship affects every other relationship. Flourishing therefore emerges not through domination or control but through reciprocal participation… re-membering.
Robin Wall Kimmerer offers an ecological grammar that further deepens this theological vision. Although writing as both botanist and Citizen Potawatomi scholar rather than a theologian (at least in the classical modern sense), Kimmerer repeatedly demonstrates that ecosystems persist through practices of reciprocity rather than extraction. Forests, moss communities, fungal networks, watersheds, and grasslands endure because countless organisms participate in mutual gift-giving beyond human awareness.[36] The modern Western imagination, however, has too often understood the world primarily as resource rather than relation. Such assumptions inevitably shape religious imagination as well. Churches formed within extractive cultures frequently approach both god and neighbor through the logic of consumption, asking what relationships can provide rather than how communities might participate in mutual flourishing.
Kimmerer’s ecological insights resonate profoundly with emerging trajectories in practical theology. If human beings are fundamentally relational creatures, then communities themselves become living ecosystems rather than collections of autonomous individuals. Congregations are not organizations that manage religious services; they are habitats within which particular forms of life either flourish or wither. Spiritual practices, therefore, function ecologically. Hospitality, forgiveness, Eucharist, lament, Sabbath, generosity, and shared discernment become communal practices that nourish relational biodiversity. Conversely, fear, competition, exclusion, consumerism, and domination function much like invasive species, degrading the health of the entire ecology.
Thomas Jay Oord’s theology of essential kenosis provides an important metaphysical grounding for such an ecological imagination. Because G-d eternally loves through uncontrolling, relational power, divine action always seeks the flourishing of relationships rather than their coercive management. Divine power is persuasive because love itself is inherently relational.[37] Creation consequently exists not as an arena within which divine sovereignty is imposed but as an evolving communion continually invited toward deeper participation in divine love. Such a vision transforms reconstruction itself. Reconstruction cannot mean reconstructing certainty, institutional control, or theological uniformity. It must instead cultivate communities capable of participating in G-d’s endlessly creative work of relational flourishing.
Yet even Oord’s profound account of divine love can be extended by attending more explicitly to ecological interdependence. Love is not merely the characteristic of individual relationships; it constitutes the dynamic pattern through which entire relational systems become capable of life. Flourishing emerges not because every relationship becomes perfect but because the ecology itself possesses resilience, adaptability, forgiveness, and mutual care. Just as healthy forests survive storms through complex interdependence, healthy communities weather conflict through practices of trust, confession, repair, and hospitality.
Parker Palmer’s understanding of community similarly challenges modern assumptions regarding both knowledge and formation. Palmer argues that truth is not possessed by isolated knowers but emerges within communities capable of sustaining honest conversation around realities greater than themselves.[38] This epistemological humility carries significant implications for reconstruction. The goal is not to replace one system of certainty with another but to cultivate communities within which persons can continue becoming together. Reconstruction therefore requires habits of listening every bit as much as theological conclusions. The church becomes less a repository of finalized answers than a community continually learning how to dwell faithfully within G-d’s unfolding reality.
Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s practical theology likewise relocates theological reflection within the ordinary practices of embodied life. Theology is not produced primarily through abstract systems but emerges through sustained attention to lived experience, caregiving, family life, institutions, neighborhoods, suffering, and hope.[39] Practical theology therefore refuses the false separation between doctrinal reconstruction and everyday existence. Communities embody theology long before they articulate it. Consequently, reconstruction cannot remain an intellectual exercise undertaken after deconstruction has dismantled inherited beliefs. Reconstruction occurs whenever communities learn to embody more truthful, hospitable, and life-giving ways of inhabiting the world together.
Taken together, these conversation partners suggest an important shift. Reconstruction is not simply cognitive. It is ecological. The question is no longer merely, What do I believe after deconstruction? Deeper questions emerge, like, What kinds of relationships make abundant life possible?
This shift also reframes the purpose of practical theology itself. Rather than defending doctrinal systems or merely solving ecclesial problems, practical theology becomes the study of communities learning to participate more deeply within G-d’s ecology of shalom. Leadership consequently changes. Spiritual formation changes. Mission changes. Even ecclesiology changes. Churches become less concerned with institutional survival and more attentive to cultivating the relational conditions under which persons, neighborhoods, watersheds, cultures, and ecosystems may flourish together.
Here I wish to press beyond my conversation partners. Shalom is not best imagined as a moral ideal or even a theological doctrine. It is an ecology. Like every healthy ecosystem, it is characterized by extraordinary diversity, resilient interdependence, continual adaptation, reciprocal gift, and generative abundance. Its health cannot be measured by the strength of isolated parts but by the quality of relationships among the whole. Every act of hospitality strengthens the ecology. Every practice of forgiveness restores damaged networks. Every table that welcomes strangers expands its biodiversity. Every reconciliation repairs another strand within the fabric of creation.
Such an ecological understanding also transforms how we imagine the work of G-d. The Spirit is not merely reconstructing individuals after deconstruction. G-d is patiently cultivating an ecology of communion in which all creation may participate and flourish. Salvation, therefore, is not escape from the world but deeper belonging within it. Sanctification is not private moral achievement but increasing participation in the flourishing of the whole. The church exists not simply to preserve doctrine but to become an anticipatory ecosystem of G-d’s coming reign—a living sign of the world’s future within the present.
If deconstruction exposes the idols that fragment relationships, re-membering names the communal practices through which those relationships are patiently restored. The larger telos toward which G-d continually draws creation is shalom itself: the flourishing ecology of rightly ordered relationships in which every creature finds its place, every gift contributes to the whole, and all things are gathered into the inexhaustible communion of Divine love.
Part IV — How Do We Live There?
Practicing Re-membering
The Practices of Re-membering
If deconstruction names the necessary work of exposing the stories, structures, and identities that no longer sustain life, re-membering names the patient practices through which persons and communities move toward wholeness in relationships capable of bearing the weight of love. Re-membering, therefore, is not principally an intellectual achievement or the adoption of a new worldview. It is a way of life cultivated through repeated habits that gradually reshape imagination, affection, and communal belonging. As practical theologians have long insisted, human beings are formed not simply by what they believe but by the practices they inhabit. Faith becomes embodied through rhythms that slowly train people into new ways of perceiving, desiring, and participating in G-d’s reconciling presence in the world.[40]
This distinction is significant. Modern Western culture often imagines reconstruction as arriving at a more coherent set of ideas after abandoning inadequate beliefs. Such an account remains deeply individualistic and cognitive. Yet if the preceding argument is correct—that persons become persons through relationships rather than in isolation—then reconstruction must likewise be relational. Communities do not simply disseminate information; they cultivate forms of life. Reconstruction is therefore less like constructing a private philosophical system than joining a living ecology whose practices gradually restore one’s capacity to receive and extend love.
Among these practices, the Eucharist occupies a unique place. Communion does not celebrate autonomous individuals who have completed their journeys of self-discovery. Rather, it gathers fragmented persons into a common body through the gift of Christ. The very language of communion resists the illusion that faith is fundamentally private. At the table, strangers become neighbors, enemies are invited toward reconciliation, and isolated selves discover that they belong to something larger than their individual narratives. The church remembers Christ precisely by becoming a remembering community, refusing the fragmentation that so often characterizes both contemporary culture and post-deconstruction spirituality.[41]
The significance of the table extends beyond sacramental worship into the ordinary practice of shared meals. Long before theology becomes systematic, it becomes edible. Throughout Scripture, meals signify hospitality, reconciliation, covenant, and delight. Jesus consistently gathered around tables where social hierarchies dissolved and unexpected relationships emerged. Shared meals remain one of the simplest yet most profound practices through which communities resist loneliness, polarization, and consumerism. To eat together is to acknowledge mutual dependence. It is to practice receiving as well as giving. In a culture increasingly marked by isolation, the table becomes a site where reconstruction quietly unfolds through ordinary presence.
Confession and lament likewise become indispensable practices of reconstruction. Deconstruction often exposes wounds previously hidden beneath certainty or performance. Yet exposure alone cannot heal what has been uncovered. Confession creates space for truthful speech before God and one another, while lament refuses both denial and despair by naming grief within the presence of divine compassion. Walter Brueggemann argues that communities incapable of lament inevitably lose their capacity for hope because they cannot honestly engage suffering.[42] Similarly, practical theologians have increasingly recognized lament as an essential communal practice that transforms trauma into shared memory rather than isolated pain. Communities that can grieve together become communities capable of imagining together.
Because reconstruction concerns the restoration of relationships, conflict cannot be avoided. Indeed, healthy conflict often becomes one of reconstruction’s primary disciplines. The goal is no longer the elimination of disagreement but the cultivation of communities capable of remaining in relationship amid profound difference. John Paul Lederach’s work in conflict transformation demonstrates that durable peace emerges not through victory but through the sustained rebuilding of relational networks capable of holding complexity without fragmentation.[43] Such practices challenge both fundamentalism’s demand for certainty and contemporary tendencies toward withdrawal whenever disagreement arises.
Forgiveness belongs within this same ecology. Properly understood, forgiveness is neither the denial of injustice nor the abandonment of accountability. Rather, it is the courageous refusal to allow violence to dictate the future of a relationship or community. Miroslav Volf reminds us that reconciliation never erases memory but transforms memory so that it no longer functions as a weapon.[44] Re-membering therefore requires practices through which truth and mercy remain inseparable.
Friendship similarly becomes a theological practice rather than merely a private preference. Aristotle recognized friendship as essential to the flourishing life, but the Jesus traditions deepen this insight by locating friendship within participation in G-d’s own life of love. Contemporary psychology increasingly confirms that secure attachment, mutual presence, and enduring relationships profoundly shape human flourishing throughout adulthood.[45] Friendship becomes one of the ordinary means through which persons are re-membered after seasons of fragmentation. Many who emerge from religious deconstruction testify that what ultimately sustained them was not finding better arguments but discovering companions who could remain present without demanding certainty.
Likewise, therapeutic practices often participate in reconstruction when understood as ministries of truthful presence rather than merely techniques of symptom reduction. The integration of psychology and practical theology has demonstrated that healing frequently requires revisiting one’s formative narratives within relationships characterized by safety, empathy, and compassionate witness. Donald Capps, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, and others have shown that pastoral and therapeutic practices converge in their shared commitment to helping persons interpret their lives within larger narratives of grace rather than shame.[46] Therapy, spiritual direction, and pastoral accompaniment thus become practices through which fractured identities are gradually woven back into communities of hope.
Reconstruction also extends beyond explicitly ecclesial settings into neighborhoods, gardens, and local places. If, as Willie James Jennings argues, Christian identity has too often been detached from place through colonial habits of possession and displacement, then faithful reconstruction requires relearning how to belong somewhere.[47] Randy Woodley similarly argues that shalom cannot be reduced to interpersonal harmony but describes the flourishing of the entire community of creation.[48] Gardening, neighborhood engagement, ecological restoration, and practices of local hospitality all become theological disciplines through which persons rediscover themselves as participants within living ecosystems rather than consumers of disconnected spaces.
Hospitality finally gathers these diverse practices into a single disposition. Reconstruction is sustained wherever communities create spaces where strangers become neighbors, questions are welcomed, grief is honored, forgiveness remains possible, and belonging precedes agreement. Such hospitality reflects the generous life of G-d, whose love continually makes room for the other without coercion or exclusion. Thomas Jay Oord’s account of G-d’s essentially uncontrolling love offers a compelling theological foundation for precisely this kind of communal life.[49]
These practices do not eliminate ambiguity, nor do they restore the false certainties that deconstruction rightly dismantles. Rather, they cultivate resilient communities capable of dwelling faithfully within complexity while remaining open to the transforming presence of G-d. Re-membering, then, is neither the recovery of a lost past nor the invention of an ideal future. It is the ongoing practice of becoming a people who learn, together, how to love again. In this sense, reconstruction is less a destination than an ecology—a communal way of life through which G-d continually re-members fractured people into the flourishing communion of shalom.
Conclusion… Becoming Together
The person with whom this essay began still occasionally introduces herself by saying, almost apologetically, “I’m deconstructing.” It remains the simplest shorthand for a journey that has cost her more than she ever imagined. She lost certainty. She lost belonging. She lost relationships she once assumed would last forever. She lost a world that had promised safety if only she believed correctly, behaved rightly, and remained inside its carefully guarded boundaries.
Yet if you were to meet her today, you would notice something else. The language of deconstruction no longer adequately names her life.
She still asks difficult questions, but they no longer arise from suspicion alone. Increasingly, they emerge from wonder. She has discovered the paradox that the opposite of certainty is not doubt but curiosity. The opposite of control is not chaos but trust. And the opposite of exclusion is not mere tolerance but hospitality.
She did not reconstruct a better ideological system.
She slowly became part of a different way of belonging.
It happened almost imperceptibly. Around shared tables where stories mattered more than arguments. In communities where confession replaced performance. Through therapy that helped her befriend the younger selves she had spent decades trying to silence. Through neighbors who taught her to care for a community garden. Through the practice of lament that refused easy optimism. Through Eucharist, where strangers became companions before they became friends. Through learning to receive forgiveness as freely as she had begun offering it. Through moments of beauty in forests, rivers, birdsong, and rain, where creation itself became a patient teacher after years of treating the world merely as a backdrop for human salvation.
Looking back, she realizes she was never simply rebuilding faith.
She was being re-membered.
The language matters.
Reconstruction often imagines an architect standing above the rubble, designing something stronger than what previously existed. The work of re-membering imagines something altogether different. It is the patient restoration of relationships that violence, fear, ideology, empire, and isolation have fragmented. What is restored is not the old order but the living body itself.
Perhaps this is why the New Testament so consistently describes salvation in relational rather than merely individual terms. The church is a body, not a collection of autonomous souls. Humanity is reconciled not simply to the Creator but to one another and to creation. The reign of G-d is imagined not as escape from the world but as the renewal of heaven and earth together. Even resurrection is not the rescue of isolated spirits but the restoration of life within G-d’s renewed creation.
Deconstruction, then, may be understood as one necessary moment within a much larger pilgrimage. It exposes the false selves and distorted systems that cannot sustain abundant life. Individuation enables persons to differentiate from inherited patterns of domination, fear, and conformity. Yet neither journey reaches its telos in autonomy. Both find their fulfillment only as persons discover themselves becoming participants within relationships of mutual belonging.
We do not become ourselves by finally standing alone.
We become ourselves by becoming together.
Such togetherness is not the recovery of tribal certainty, nor the creation of communities defined by ideological agreement. Communities rooted in re-membering are necessarily porous. Having experienced the pain of exclusion, they resist reproducing the very mechanisms that wounded them. Their boundaries become places of welcome rather than defense. Difference becomes invitation rather than threat. Conflict becomes an opportunity for deeper communion rather than a justification for separation.
This, I suggest, is the practical theological task before us.
The age of deconstruction has revealed, often painfully, the insufficiency of inherited certainties and exclusionary religious systems. We should not lament that exposure. Indeed, it may prove to be one of the Spirit’s most necessary works in our time. But exposure alone cannot sustain a human life. Critique cannot nourish a community. Suspicion cannot cultivate flourishing.
What is now required is a richer imagination.
Not an imagination that forgets the wounds of the past, nor one that rushes prematurely toward resolution, but one capable of envisioning lives re-membered into the flourishing of all and everything.
This is, finally, an ecology of shalom.
Shalom, again, is not the tranquility of the isolated individual who has finally achieved inner peace. It is the dynamic flourishing of relationships rightly ordered among G-d, neighbor, self, and creation. It is less a destination than a way of inhabiting the world—a way marked by reciprocity, justice, delight, hospitality, and mutual care. Within such an ecology every creature both gives and receives. Every life belongs because every life participates in the flourishing of the whole.
Perhaps this is where Derrida’s deepest questions unexpectedly meet the oldest hopes of Christian theologies. If deconstruction teaches us to loosen our grip on idols, then re-membering teaches us how to receive one another again. If individuation frees us from inherited false selves, then communion invites us into a larger identity we could never achieve alone. If reconstruction imagines rebuilding stronger walls, re-membering imagines removing stones from those walls to restore watersheds, build longer tables, shelter neighbors, and cultivate gardens where strangers become companions.
The woman from our opening story still does not have all the answers. Neither do I.
But she has found companions.
She has found practices.
She has found an open and welcoming table.
And perhaps that has always been the deeper invitation hidden beneath every necessary deconstruction—not simply to think differently, but to belong differently; not merely to reconstruct belief, but to become re-membered within God’s ongoing work of reconciling all things.
For the future of faith may not depend upon how successfully we rebuild what has fallen apart.
It may depend upon whether we learn, together, to become members once again of the living body of creation, participating in God’s shalomic imagination for the flourishing of all and everything.
Reflection & Discussion
1 . What inherited beliefs, assumptions, or systems have you found yourself questioning or deconstructing?
What experiences, relationships, or encounters first prompted those questions? Have you experienced deconstruction primarily as loss, liberation, grief, or some combination of these?
2 . The essay proposes that deconstruction is less about abandoning faith than about telling the truth.
Where have honesty and faithfulness converged in your own life? Have there been moments when asking difficult questions felt like an act of deeper fidelity rather than unbelief?
3 . I’ve tried to make the case that reconstruction is better understood as re-membering than rebuilding or reconstruction.
What aspects of your life, relationships, or community have been fragmented or “dis-membered”? What people, practices, or experiences have participated in gathering those fragments back into a more integrated whole?
4 . Shalom is described as an ecology of rightly ordered relationships rather than simply personal peace.
How might this vision reshape the way you think about spiritual formation, the church, your neighborhood, or your relationship with the more-than-human world? Where do you already glimpse signs of such an ecology?
5 . Which practices of re-membering most invite you at this season of your life?
Consider practices such as shared meals, confession, lament, friendship, therapy, hospitality, neighborhood engagement, ecological care, Eucharist, or forgiveness. Which one feels like an invitation from the Spirit, and what concrete step might you take this week to begin participating more fully in God’s ongoing work of re-membering?
Endnotes
[1] Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 7–11; Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 3–16.
[2] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii–xxv.
[3] James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 15–39.
[4] Throughout this essay I intentionally employ two different conventions when referring to the Divine. Although this may initially appear idiosyncratic, the distinction reflects a theological and semiotic conviction rather than a stylistic preference.
I use god (lowercase) when referring to human conceptions of the Creator and Lover of all—that is, the particular images, doctrines, assumptions, projections, or inherited narratives that individuals and communities hold about ultimate reality. In this sense, every tradition has its god: the mental and cultural construct through which it imagines, interprets, and often domesticates the mystery of the Divine. Deconstruction frequently exposes not the death of G-d, but the inadequacy of these inherited gods. Much of what people lose in seasons of religious deconstruction is not the Divine but an image of the Divine that can no longer bear the weight of lived experience, moral conscience, or faithful inquiry. One’s ideas about god never equate to God.
By contrast, I write G-d when referring to the Holy Mystery who forever exceeds every human concept, doctrine, or image—the One Christians confess as Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Love. The missing vowel is intentional. I borrow this practice in part from the Jewish tradition of refraining from pronouncing or fully writing the divine Name (יהוה, YHWH), a discipline rooted not in superstition but in reverence for the One who cannot be possessed by language. While I am not attempting to reproduce that tradition, I wish to honor its theological insight: the Divine always surpasses our words.
At the same time, the hyphen functions as a semiotic interruption. Because the English word God has become culturally familiar, it often passes unnoticed, as though its meaning were obvious and universally shared. Writing G-d deliberately disrupts that familiarity, inviting readers to pause and ask what they actually mean when they invoke this signifier. Which god is being imagined? What assumptions accompany the symbol? What experiences, doctrines, or cultural narratives have filled the word with meaning? My hope is that this small typographical disturbance creates space for theological curiosity and humility, reminding us that no human symbol can finally contain the inexhaustible mystery to which it points.
This distinction also supports one of the central arguments of this work. Deconstruction is often experienced as the dismantling of one’s inherited god—the conceptual world through which one has understood ultimate reality. Yet such dismantling need not culminate in nihilism or unbelief. It may instead become an opening toward deeper encounter with G-d, whose reality is not exhausted by any theology, institution, ideology, or religious imagination. The movement from god to G-d is therefore not a movement from faith to skepticism but from certainty toward wonder, from possession toward participation, and from conceptual mastery toward relational communion with the inexhaustible Mystery who is always more than we can say.
There is yet another layer to this typographical choice. Although I do not intend G-d as an abbreviation for the English expression “god damn,” the visual interruption inevitably evokes it for some readers. I welcome that association because it exposes one of the most pervasive distortions within Western religious imagination: the reduction of the Divine to a deity whose primary posture toward the world is judgment, exclusion, and condemnation. Much of what passes for “God” in popular religion is, in effect, a god who damns—a divine projection enlisted to bless our tribe, defend our certainties, justify our violence, and exclude those deemed other. Such images have inflicted profound spiritual and physical wounds and have driven countless people from communities of faith.
The G-d to whom this work points is not that god. The One revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus consistently moves toward those who have been excluded, refuses the logic of domination, and labors for the flourishing of all creation. If the interruption in G-d momentarily calls to mind the phrase “god damn,” I hope it also prompts readers to ask whether the god they imagine is fundamentally a damning god or the inexhaustible Love who is forever creating, sustaining, reconciling, and inviting all things toward shalom. In that sense, the missing vowel becomes both a critique of theological imagination and an invitation to its conversion.
[5] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 1–19.
[6] By deconstruction I refer to Jacques Derrida’s philosophical practice of attending to the internal tensions, silences, and binary oppositions within texts and traditions, revealing the instability of seemingly fixed meanings in order to make room for greater justice, hospitality, and responsibility. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology; and John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell.
[7] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158–64; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94.
[8] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1–18.
[9] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 32–56.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400.
[11] Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Thesis IX, 392.
[12] Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3–19.
[13] Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 16–18.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25–27.
[15] Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, pt. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 275–89.
[16] James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2005), 14–36.
[17] Donald W. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York, NY: International Universities Press, 1965), 140–52.
[18] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1988), 12–53.
[19] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1–24; John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 29–58.
[20] Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 6–28.
[21] Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 300–315.
[22] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 134–171.
[23] Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2016), 22–49.
[24] Kenneth J. Gergen, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), xv–xxii, 1–34.
[25] Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 1–21, 109–123.
[26] Isa. 11:10–12; Ezek. 37:15–28; Luke 15; Acts 2:1–21; Eph. 2:11–22 (NRSVUE).
[27] 1 Cor. 12:12–27; Rom. 12:3–8.
[28] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15–65.
[29] 1 Cor. 10:16–17; Luke 22:14–20.
[30] Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 1–26.
[31] Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 17–45.
[32] Thomas Jay Oord, A Systematic Theology of Love, vol. 1, God and Creation (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2026).
[33] Col. 1:15–20.
[34] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 6–12, 285–94.
[35] Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 23–41, 79–101.
[36] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020), 111–28, 345–58; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 5–18.
[37] Thomas Jay Oord, A Systematic Theology of Love, vol. 1: God and Creation (SacraSage Press, 2026), 173–212, 311–46.
[38] Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, 20th anniversary ed. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 90–110.
[39] Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The Contributions of Practical Theology,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 2nd ed., ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 1–16; Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 47–76.
[40] Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 47–71; Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, ed., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 84–90.
[41] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15–65; Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 25–39.
[42] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 57–78.
[43] John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–59.
[44] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, rev. ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2019), 125–154.
[45] Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 185–235; Robert Karen, Becoming Attached (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 343–381.
[46] Donald Capps, Life Cycle Theory and Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 101–128; Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Christian Theology in Practice: Discovering a Discipline (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 167–194.
[47] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 285–294.
[48] Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 19–61.
[49] Thomas Jay Oord, A Systematic Theology of Love, vol. 1: God and Creation (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2026), 117–176.
Peace, dwight
