Theologian keeps death close when she talks to freshmen - Theresa Sanders

National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001 by Arthur Jones

Movies, relics speak of the central question of life

Death runs deep in Theresa Sanders' books and teaching. Dead bodies. Recently or long expired. She also likes relics, saintly bits of death.

The Georgetown University theologian makes the corpse a wonder to behold. She uses the dead body as a tool to pry into life and into theology. It's an approach that keeps her students coming back for more.

In the introduction to her first theology book she examines a photograph from the war in Bosnia. Corpses "hopelessly entangled among each other," have been unloaded by a. driver who "glances back from the cab's open door" to make sure his entire cargo has been dumped.

Sanders writes in the introduction that mixed among the corpses "is other debris: a wheelbarrow, a stretcher, sticks and dirt. One man's arm, stiffened and bent like a claw, reaches up from beneath another man's body in a parody of embrace." She quotes Larry in the Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge, "The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead."

Sanders, 37, keeps death close when she talks to freshman students in The Problem of God, the introductory theology course. "I guess I have a morbid fascination because death is the central question of life," she told NCR. I figured if I tackled death first" as a scholar, "everything else in life would be easy."

Sanders tells her students that there are two things "I am absolutely sure about, would go to the mat for.

"The first one is God is love. The second that love is stronger than death."

What Sanders loves is teaching that introductory course.

"I've never yet had the feeling that I hadn't seduced them into thinking theology is the most fascinating thing in the world."

She doesn't take them to a cemetery to convince them, though. She takes them to the movies. She has them view movies about death, movies like "Romero," the biographical account of the life of Bishop Oscar Romero, assassinated after standing up for the poor of El Salvador.

"In film," she said, "you see theology written in experience. I think film does have the power to change people's lives -- in a way Karl Rahner might if they read Rahner."

Sanders, who holds a doctorate in religion from Syracuse University, specialized in Rahner, the 20th-century Jesuit theologian.

"They're never going to read Rahner. But if I can show them a film where Rahner's theology comes out -- `Romero.'

"I tell my students that Christians should hate the cross in the way they should hate all murders," Sanders said. "I tell them that Jesus' death isn't good in itself. It's only good because it's part of his fundamental commitment to people and to their needs and concerns.

"And I try to show the same thing in `Romero.'"

The movie shows that Romero dies, "but he's resurrected in the end. There are those closing quotes that say a bishop will die, but the people of God, which is the church, will never die," and that Romero realized his blood would be "a seed."

She referred to Romero's words heard in a voiceover at the end of the 1989 film. "If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be a reality. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."

Sanders acknowledges that she doesn't reach every student. But she tries.

Her first assumption when she walks into the classroom to teach is that "somewhere along the line, all of my students have been hurt by religion."

"Experience confirms this," she said.

"I teach to the kid in the back who has to be there, doesn't want to be there, and who loathes anything associated with religion," she said. "I seduce them by getting them to ask all the questions they're afraid to ask or thought they couldn't ask: Is there a God? If there's a God, how come there's so much evil in the world? What do I do with my roommate who's a Buddhist? My church says she's going to hell. Isn't that the stupidest thing you ever heard?"

However, when she sits down to write -- a commitment that's resulted in two books so far -- she makes the point that this is what life's about, that "as hurtful as religions and their attendant theologies can be, they are inescapable."

Her books so far: Body and Belief: Why the Body of Jesus Cannot Heal, (The Davies Group, 2000) and Celluloid Saints (Mercer University Press, 2001). She got the idea for Celluloid Saints when she was in Blockbusters picking up a movie and realized she teaches a course on saints and another on film but knew of no book that combined the topics.

Search for meaning

"We are creatures who seek meaning, and, in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, we can never be without a sense of `ultimate concern.' I try to offer students a language to express the thoughts, doubts and questions they have about religion," she said.

"I want to give them the power to think and to speak and eventually to act," she said. "I want my students to understand Christianity as a beautiful tradition that is constantly struggling: to express its vision of the world, to live up to that vision and to articulate that vision intellectually."