The thought came to me somewhere over the Pacific, on a flight to Hawaii, sitting next to my mom. She was reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer—at my urging, actually, since I’ve invited our whole church to read it this year. As she made her way through the book, she paused and asked me, “What does dialectic  mean?” It’s not an easy word to define concisely, and I gave her a somewhat clumsy answer. But in that moment, I was reminded just how central dialectical theology has been in shaping my own work—how it has formed my instincts, even when I haven’t named it explicitly. I’ve never been drawn to theology that resolves too easily. From the earliest days of my theological curiosity, I found myself uncomfortable with systems that tried to explain God as if God were simply another object of study—something to be grasped, categorized, or managed. My instincts have always been dialectical. I’m drawn to the tensions, the contradictions, the places where meaning trembles rather t...