Dr. Amy E. W. Maxey
Assistant Professor of Spirituality
Email: amaxey@ost.edu
Phone: 210-341-1366 EXT 208
Ph.D Theology (Systematic Theology) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
M.T.S University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
B.A. Duke University, Durham, NC
Interests
Dr. Amy Maxey’s research specializes in Christian mystical traditions (especially from the medieval period), contemporary feminist theologies, and 20th-century Catholic systematic theology. Her work in spirituality resides at the intersection of contemporary theological anthropology, epistemology, and the hermeneutics of religious experience. Before arriving at Oblate in 2022, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame.
Publications
“Feminist Theologies and Christian Mystical Spiritualities: Convergences, Challenges, and the Future.” In The Future of Christian Spirituality — In Our Lives, In Our Churches, and In the Academy: Essays in Honor of Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, edited by John J. and David Pocta. New York: Crossroad, 2022.
“’I want to die living’: The Entanglement of Death and Desire in Mechthild of Magdeburg.” In Medieval Mystical Women in the West: Growing in the Height of Love, edited by John Arblaster. Contemporary Theological Explorations in Mysticism. Routledge (forthcoming)
“The Uses of Mystical Eros as Power in Feminist Theologies: Issues of Mediation, Intuition, and Rationality.” In Theology and Media(tion): Rendering the Absent Present, edited by Stephen Okey and Katherine Schmidt. College Theology Society Annual Volume 69. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2024. (forthcoming)
Dr. Maxey is currently working on a book manuscript which proposes a feminist theology of mystical consciousness grounded in mystical eros (desire). Her work makes feminist interventions in how mysticism has traditionally been understood in masculinist theological and philosophical paradigms as well as critiques some recent feminist theological engagements with the mystical tradition. In conversation with a variety of feminist and womanist theologians, historian of mysticism Bernard McGinn, and other classic theorizers of mysticism, she articulates a feminist account of mystical consciousness as erotically intellective, concretely embodied, and embedded in social relationships, which offers new horizons for retrieving the Christian mystical tradition for contemporary work in theological anthropology, theopoetics, and the mystical-political.