The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory: Time and Eternity in the Far Country

Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

Part I Time and Its Discontents.

1 Our Time in Vietnam.

The Divine Kenosis and Being-Toward-Death.

“Our Time” in Vietnam.

“When Time Is Nothing but Speed”.

2 Killing Time.

Boredom and Atrocity.

God and the Ordinary.

Part II Created Time.

3 Christological Time.

“The Detemporalization of Time”.

Being and Time.

The Goodness of Death.

The Spiritual Life of the Age.

A Time of Idols.

The Fragility of Time.

4 The Sorrow of the Exile: Trinity, Memory, and Return.

Trinity and Mind.

Trinity and Forgetting.

Forgetting God.

Desire and Return.

The Witness of the Martyrs.

Authentic Temporality.

Part III Memory and the Americans in Vietnam.

5 Saving Our Lives with a Story: Memory and Narrative.

The Case for Forgetting.

Realism and Narrative.

From Paradox to Mimesis.

From Mimesis to Forgiveness.

Trinity, Forgiveness, and Gift.

Forgiveness as Gift Exchange.

The Gift of New Stories.

6 Re-performing the Dark Night of the Soul: Memory and Liturgy.

Two Views of Liturgical Memory.

Liturgies of War.

Incomplete Killers.

Rival Liturgies.

God’s Acting on Time.

“Out of the Night”.

7 Eucharistic Re-membering: Memory and Politics.

National Memory.

Suspending Time.

Walling Memory.

Resurrection as National Mythos.

Depoliticizing Memory.

Superpower Biopolitics and the Possibility of Fugitive Bodies.

Spectral Others in Beloved.

Ghosts and the Moreness of Time: Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream.

Tending Memory: Listening, Traveling, and Tabling.

Eucharistic Memory.

Eucharist as Traveling Table.

The Politics of Re-membering.

Soundings.

Index.