I hate "liminality."

I used to hate the word “liminal” and its sibling “liminality.” Actually, I hate lots of words. At the top of the list are made-up names for products (especially pharmaceutical products, corporations and organizations. I think these are usually based on some sort of market research. I’m thinking of names like “Xarelto” or “Mounjaro.” I served on the board of Mennonite Mutual Aid for 12 years; they are now called “Everence.” High on my list of names to hate is “Converge” as the name for the denomination formerly known as “Baptist General Conference.” Another category of words to hate are bits of academic jargon that seem intended to obscure meaning or to show off or both. “Liminality” always struck me as both obscure and pretentious.

But Carmen Joy Imes, in her book Bearing God’s Name (IVP Academic, 2019), rehabbed “liminal” and “liminality” for me. (By the way, Bearing God’s Name is a really, really good book; I can’t recommend it highly enough.) She provides a little bit of helpful etymology of “liminality”—it’s from the Latin word limen, which means “threshold”—and also some of the history of the academic use of the term. She notes that liminality involves transition from one identity to another. She identifies Israel’s time in the desert as a liminal space. Of the wilderness journey of Israel she writes, “Far more than just a place to pass through, it is the workshop of Israel’s becoming” (p. 18, emphasis hers) Later she writes, “Having lost their old identity, they are ready to become what they are meant to be.” (p. 19)

I am 65 and I anticipate retiring sometime in the next one to 10 years, though one never knows. (I feel the need to add a genuine —not simply pious—“Lord willing” at this point.) I think that I am experiencing liminality. My professional identity for 40 years has been that of a professional philosopher and (I would add after the last 10 or so years) theologian. I am grateful to Imes for reminding me that the transition to retirement is about becoming what I am meant to be.

I’m starting this blog because I am newly conscious of being in this state of liminality. But I do not plan to use this space to write about my experience of liminality, about the transition in identity. I tend to think that consciously focusing on the experience of liminality would dilute the actual experience. It might be like taking a hike through Yosemite with your video camera to your eye; you are recording the experience but recording it also diminishes it.

So, I plan to write about whatever I am reading and thinking about. It might be Socrates or it might be Bukayo Saka. It might be about the state of evangelical Anabaptism or Kansas politics. I ought to write about why I think Bearing God’s Name is such a good book; perhaps I’ll address that after I finish Imes’s new book, Being God’s Image.

My goal is to post something once a week; I hope on Monday morning. But I won’t make a promise.

Carmen Imes has persuaded me of the value of liminality. But I’m still a bit dubious of the word “liminality.”

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