Laughing in a Tomb

Camp, as Susan Sontag put it, dethrones the serious, which resonates with Christianity's adoration of Jesus's cross: the crucifixion is a seriousness that fails. It succeeds, of course, in what it sets out to do. Jesus is, after all, killed. But his death fails, and gloriously so, when God on Easter morning splits Christ's tomb wide open with the quaking force of a lunatic laughter.

In Laughing in a Tomb: An Experiment in Camp Theology, Brandon Ambrosino explores what he calls camp theology. Critically and creatively engaging with Jesus's sayings, parables, and doodles, he argues that Jesus's personality is characterized by camp traits like incongruity, eccentricity, humor, and theatricality. Overall, however, Ambrosino believes it's Jesus's passion for the kingdom of God, and his corollary refusal to take the present moment "straight," that make Jesus a camp figure. Meandering between biblical and contemporary christological experiments, camp theology takes seriously both historical Jesus research and cultural theory. Camp theology reminds the theological academy that there are ways to imagine Christ's personhood that haven't yet been discovered by good systematicians.

In an age when seriously tragic things happen almost around the clock, camp reminds us that it's possible to take the serious seriously without allowing the serious to take us. Camp allows us to accept the world for what it is and to simultaneously imagine what more it might become. By camping a bit of the world, by throwing it in quotation marks, we bring the present into correspondence with the future that we hope for.