Scholars@Duke
Natalie Carnes

Natalie Carnes

Professor of Theology
Divinity School
ncarnes@div.duke.edu
209 Gray Bldg, 90964, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Reconsidering Non-Contrastive Transcendence

Journal Article Modern Theology · October 1, 2025 Full text Cite

Feminism, Art, and Religion in the North Atlantic

Journal Article · December 11, 2024 While the terms feminist and feminism originated in the North Atlantic in the 19th century, the practices and ideals of feminism emerged through global circulations of power, goods, and ideas. Outside Europe and North A ... Full text Cite

Attunement: The art and politics of feminist theology

Book · June 20, 2024 What is a feminist theologian to do with Christianity's patriarchal inheritance? She can avoid the most patriarchal aspects of the theological tradition and seek resources for constructive work elsewhere. Or she can critique misogynistic texts and artifact ... Full text Cite

Lord, When did We See You? Towards a Topography of the Visual

Journal Article International Journal of Systematic Theology · April 1, 2023 As it outlines a Christian topography of the visual, this article argues that the gaze cultivated by attention to art and the gaze of mercy bear important affinities, even if particular artworks exhibit tensions with mercy. Drawing on Augustine, Dionysius ... Full text Cite

Gender and Ecclesiology

Chapter · January 1, 2020 Cite

How love for the image cast out fear of it in early Christianity

Journal Article Religions · February 7, 2017 Iconoclastic and iconophilic impulses have long vied for pre-eminence in Christianity, coming to one particularly fraught crisis point in the Byzantine Iconomachy of the eighth and ninth centuries. Funding both impulses, this paper argues, is a profound Pl ... Full text Cite

'That Cross's Children, Which Our Crosses Are': Imitatio Christi, Imitatio Crucis

Journal Article Scottish Journal of Theology · February 1, 2016 How does one rightly name and discern imitatio Christi, imitatio crucis, and the relation between them? In one provocative attempt to answer this question, John Howard Yoder identifies Christ-imaging in vulnerable enemy love and rejects all other criteria. ... Full text Cite

A reconsideration of religious authority in Christian theology

Journal Article Heythrop Journal Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology · January 1, 2014 As Stanley Cavell has critiqued Christianity for displacing authority from the individual to somewhere beyond critical assessment, so several Christian theologians have also turned to Wittgenstein to justify just such displacement. This article suggests th ... Full text Cite

Possession and dispossession: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Gregory of Nyssa on life amidst skepticism

Journal Article Modern Theology · January 1, 2013 This article follows Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Gregory of Nyssa in a journey of epistemic dispossession. It begins by tracing two ways of wandering off this trail, two epistemological sirens that tempt wayfarers from a path of epistemic disp ... Full text Cite

The mysteries of our existence: Estrangement and theatricality

Journal Article Modern Theology · July 1, 2012 Full text Cite