Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts welcomes Dr. Natalie Carnes, professor of theology, to our affiliated faculty. We sat down to explore her story and her approach to teaching theology and the arts.

Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your undergraduate studies at Harvard. How did that impact your journey as an academic, if at all?

A key moment for me came my sophomore year at Harvard University, when I needed to fill a last-minute gap in my coursework. My advisor recommended a master’s level course on feminist theology with Dr. Sarah Coakley at Harvard Divinity School, and that class proved groundbreaking for me. 

In the first part of that class, Professor Coakley took us through different historical periods, highlighting the issues of gender and sexuality characterizing each of them. I realized then that I didn’t have to decide between the particular politics and theology of the Christianity from my home in East Texas and giving up on Christianity all together. There were so many different ways Christians faithfulness had looked over the centuries, and that simple insight opened up new possibilities for my faith and inspired my interest in theology. 

So when did you become interested in theology and the arts? Was your interest in the arts developed later, or did it go along with the feminist angle?

The year after I took feminist theology, I took another course at Harvard Divinity on Cappadocian Theology taught by Father Maximos Constas. In that class, I read Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses for the first time, and in one of my weekly responses, I wrote the question: “What does Gregory mean by beauty?” 

My professor picked that question out and said in his lecture, “Natalie has asked this question about beauty, and in some ways, that really is the question.” That was such a key moment for me—to have my question validated and realize that maybe I was onto something. I found I kept returning to questions of beauty in other thinkers I read in my master’s program at University of Chicago, and eventually, I would return to the question of Gregory’s conception of beauty in my dissertation.  

 

Theology and the arts allows us to register the cultural anxieties of our moment and address them from new angles. How do desire and art go together? How does art help us think about race and poverty? How is it art a place to think about gender? Theology and the arts is a big, layered, generous conversation that provides new ways into what I take to be some of the most important questions of theology today.

Dr. Natalie Carnes, Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School

You completed your ThD at Duke in 2011. When did Duke come on your radar? 

After I completed my master’s degree and started applying to doctoral programs, I found I was drawn to Duke for the culture of the institution. It was a place that was committed to the tradition and church while also being academically serious and culturally engaged. 

And the faculty were excellent, including Dr. Warren Smith, whose beautiful book on Gregory of Nyssa I found so intellectual and soulful, and Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, whose work in feminist theology was so inspiring. And, of course, Hauerwas was there, and he was such an important thinker. Shortly after I came, Dr. Begbie was hired and DITA began, so that was encouraging to know I was in a place that would provide training in theology and the arts, too.

Now you teach theology and the arts courses. Can you share more about your pedagogical approach to teaching these kinds of courses?

I taught my first theology and the arts course at Baylor, and for the final project, I had students present artworks and creative work they had made in discussion with the academic content of the course. And it was fascinating—I found that in their creative projects, students were more vulnerable and more able to explore their own ambivalence about a particular topic more. So the projects had such depth and complexity (and emotion!) to them. 

Here at Duke, I’m finding ways to carry on that approach. I open my Introduction to Theology course by asking students to reflect on pieces of visual art that relate to the themes of the day, and in my upcoming hybrid course Entanglement and the Arts, I’ll also be incorporating creative projects and artwork. 

Is there a particular course you’re most excited about? What are you hoping to teach during your time at Duke Divinity School?

I’m really looking forward to a new course I’m developing on the theologies of creativity, in which I’ll explore how creativity is integral to being human and being Christian. 

I also want to challenge a certain vision of making that is bound up with colonialist legacies of the autonomous white man who effaces all his dependencies to make his mark of genius on the world. 

So we’ll explore alternate theologies of creativity—such as creativity as the greening, as a form of liberation, as an expression of the erotic, and even as a type of birth. I want to reflect on creativity while holding together an important set of tensions: creativity as both autonomous and dependent, active and receptive, individual and collective, human and nonhuman. What types of creatives and possibilities come into view with this alternative legacy? 

By way of close, what would you say to a young student interested in studying theology and the arts? Is it a worthwhile line of study to pursue?

Absolutely. Theology and the arts is at the heart of the whole study of theology. The central questions of theology and the arts—about how we perceive and represent God in the world, about how God comes to us in our material existence, about how we in our material existence honor and are faithful to this God—are also central questions of systematic and moral theology. 

But theology and the arts also allows us to register the cultural anxieties of our moment and address them from new angles. How do desire and art go together? How does art help us think about race and poverty? How is it art a place to think about gender? Theology and the arts is a big, layered, generous conversation that provides new ways into what I take to be some of the most important questions of theology today. Whether you consider yourself an artist, a lover of art, or just someone looking for fresh insight into central theological questions, theology and the arts is a great home for theological study.
 

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