Exhibiting God: The curatorial as theological method

Seminar with Dan Siedell, Dept of Culture & Aesthetics, Stockholm University.

Exhibiting God proposes museal theology as a constructive framework for academic theology in a post-Christian, post-secular world. Its central argument is that academic theology is best understood as the museal afterlife of Christian faith— a discourse that arrives always afterward, at a remove from the spontaneous faith that generated it. Rather than mourning this condition of lateness and distance, Exhibiting God follows a Proustian logic: it is in the afterlife of artifacts, separated from their original contexts and re-displayed in the museum that new creative and theological possibilities emerge.

Daniel A. Siedell Bio

Daniel A. Siedell is Affiliated Lecturer in Curating in the Dept of Culture & Aesthetics at Stockholm University and Visiting Researcher at the Stockholm School of Theology (2023-24). His research traces the boundaries and intersections of art, theology, religion, theory, and spirituality and he does this by deploying the concept of the curatorial as a both a theological theory and method. Trained as an art historian (PhD University of Iowa), he spent the first decade of his professional career as an art museum curator, and has taught art history and curatorial studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and King’s College in New York City. He recently received a PhD in theology from Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, under the direction of process theologian Catherine Keller.