Slow Adventism: Ecclesiological Holzwege - Paperback

by Hanz Gutierrez Salazar (Author), Abigail Doukhan (Foreword by), Zane Yi (Foreword by)

A "fast Adventism," as much as a hypertrophic body, is not necessarily more performant. "Faster" and "bigger" are not necessarily synonyms of health or flourishing. In order for somebody or something to flourish, it may be necessary to recover incompleteness, vulnerability, and slowness as necessary and primordial conditions for becoming human. Full and plethoric entities are inappropriate and unprepared to flourish because they are not touched by a beneficial emptiness that is essential for surviving and entering into relation. As much as persuasive and touching melodies presuppose and include silence and pauses, so healthy beings are not plethoric but intermittent and interrupted entities; they are "reasonable beings," who have learned to perceive life's systole and diastole as mechanism that support life in its contractions and expansions, in its affirmation and flexibility, in its giving and receiving in the context of the multiple relationships that life offers and demands from us.

Author Biography

Hanz Gutierrez Salazar, from Peru, holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and medicine. He is full professor of systematic theology at the Italian Adventist University in Florence, Italy. His latest texts are The Discovery of the We: Chronicles of a Pandemic (2021), The Joy of the Body: Beyond Renunciation and Transgression (2023), Beyond the Bible, Beyond the West: The "Eros" of Interpretation (2023), and The Ecological Kingdom of God: For a Post-Humanist Reading of the Book of Psalms (2024).