ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Gaulke is a belief-fluid organizer, author, and Lutheran pastor. From 2009 to 2023, he served communities in Bridgeport, Chicago's South Loop, and the Town of Cicero in Illinois. In community with others, he co-founded and collaborated with neighborhood groups across Chicagoland, working to shut down abusive polluters, win public transportation, raise minimum wage, and abolish cash bail in Illinois. He also co-taught Public Church at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. In 2023, Tom followed his incredible spouse to Wisconsin, where she serves in public health. A rostered leader in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Tom serves in a Specialized Call to community organizing through the South-Central Synod of Wisconsin. He is a co-founder of the Groundswell Collective in Walworth County, a community group that won Sunday public transportation in the county, and that is currently working to establish an intergenerational care center.
Tom serves as a Rural and Small Town Organizer with the Wisconsin Senior Empowerment Project where he works with groups and individuals across the state engaged in campaigns focused on building people power around issues of care, housing, transportation, and isolation. Tom is the author of An Unpromising Hope (2021) and co-author of Everyday Armageddons (2023), as well as numerous articles, essays, and zines. Tom serves on the board of Lutherdale Camp and as an on-call chaplain with The Black String Triage Ensemble in Milwaukee. He is currently writing and enjoying fatherhood in Wisconsin.
Tom serves as a Rural and Small Town Organizer with the Wisconsin Senior Empowerment Project where he works with groups and individuals across the state engaged in campaigns focused on building people power around issues of care, housing, transportation, and isolation. Tom is the author of An Unpromising Hope (2021) and co-author of Everyday Armageddons (2023), as well as numerous articles, essays, and zines. Tom serves on the board of Lutherdale Camp and as an on-call chaplain with The Black String Triage Ensemble in Milwaukee. He is currently writing and enjoying fatherhood in Wisconsin.
In the past hundred years, the average American lifespan has increased by nearly three decades. While a good thing, this extra time has also created the conditions for modern ordinary death–death marked by chronic illness, lengthy pervasive debility, and often isolation from community. Most of us, most of our friends and family, and most of the world will die an ordinary modern death. Our deaths will not make the news. They will not be discussed by strangers. They won’t be written about by generations to come. Rather, they will happen behind closed doors, tucked away from the world, after a lengthy period of pain, illness, and cognitive decline. Everyday Armageddons: Stories and Reflections on Death, Dying, God and Waste is a collection of narratives, stories, and theopoetic reflections about those ordinary deaths.
Drawing from over two decades of work as a Hospice Chaplain, a Nurses’ Aid, and an Emergency Medical Technician, the Rev. Matthew J. Holmes invites us to peer into the often occulted dimensions of life’s endings. From bedsores to isolation, from impacted bowels to the nursing home economy, from neglect to deep desperate love, modern death’s characteristics are navigated here with insight, honesty, depth, and a clarity rarely seen in the literature.
Following the sense of horror and humor evoked in each narrative are theopoetic and theological reflections from the Rev. Thomas R. Gaulke,
Drawing from over two decades of work as a Hospice Chaplain, a Nurses’ Aid, and an Emergency Medical Technician, the Rev. Matthew J. Holmes invites us to peer into the often occulted dimensions of life’s endings. From bedsores to isolation, from impacted bowels to the nursing home economy, from neglect to deep desperate love, modern death’s characteristics are navigated here with insight, honesty, depth, and a clarity rarely seen in the literature.
Following the sense of horror and humor evoked in each narrative are theopoetic and theological reflections from the Rev. Thomas R. Gaulke,
Ph.D. A noted theologian and Lutheran pastor, Tom brings a playfulness to the conversation, engaging issues of hope, meaningless, disenchantment, sacramentology, academic theology, grace, wishful thinking, and religiosity in relation to modern death and postmodern longing.
Every day, worlds end. Armageddon is not a battle far removed into the future. It is taking place right now–in the hospital, at the nursing home, across the street, and inside our very bodies. The world ends in ways big and small. It ends in pain and in love. It ends with tears and with relief. It ends with laughter and pain. The ends of worlds are often grotesque, the final battles often the bloodiest. This book is an opening into those endings and an invitation into the search for whatever meaning and whatever of God might lie therein.
Every day, worlds end. Armageddon is not a battle far removed into the future. It is taking place right now–in the hospital, at the nursing home, across the street, and inside our very bodies. The world ends in ways big and small. It ends in pain and in love. It ends with tears and with relief. It ends with laughter and pain. The ends of worlds are often grotesque, the final battles often the bloodiest. This book is an opening into those endings and an invitation into the search for whatever meaning and whatever of God might lie therein.
ABOUT AN UNPROMISING HOPE (PICKWICK, 2021)
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Written in a theopoetic key, An Unpromising Hope challenges Christian reliance on the motif of promise, especially where promise is regarded as a prerequisite for the experience of hope. It pursues instead an unpromising hope available to the agnostic or belief-fluid members and leaders of faith communities. The book rejects any theological judgement about doubt and hopelessness being sinful. It also rejects any hope which is grounded in a sense of Christian supremacy.
Chapter One focuses on Ernst Bloch’s antifascist concept of utopian surplus, putting Bloch in conversation with queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. Chapter Two explores the saudadic and theopoetic hope of Rubem Alves. Chapter Three turns to the womanist theologies of Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, and A. Elaine Brown Crawford. Finally, Chapter Four engages the post-colonial eschatology of Vítor Westhelle, framing hope as nearby in space, rather than nearby in time. Each of these offers an unpromising hope that may be tapped into by those who wish to affirm belief-fluidity in their own communities, and by those who wish to speak of hope honestly, whether or not, at any given moment, they believe in God or in the promises of a god. |