Margin Writing and Marginal Communities: Between Belonging and Non-Belonging

Abstract

What does it mean to live “in the margins of tradition”? Many intentional Christian communities occupy this space of marginality, living on the edge of a tradition in which they feel both the need to belong and the impossibility of belonging. Marginal hermeneutics suggests that the interpretive space of “the margins” is a creative, productive, vital site of receptive and critical engagement with a tradition's enriching and distorting effects, and with our own contemporary questions and concerns.