Attention toward the Alienated Alien: UAP Fascination, Stranger Fetishism, and Haunto-Postcolonial Preaching

Contemporary fascination with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) provides an unexpected lens through which to examine a homiletical problem of attention: difference can become intensely visible while remaining detached from the histories and relations that produce its strangeness. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s stranger fetishism, feminist analyses of racialized sexualization, and postcolonial homiletics, this article names this dynamic the fetishizing gaze in the pulpit. It then establishes haunto-postcolonial preaching as a counter-practice of attention that listens for suppressed histories, unresolved wounds, and forms of suffering obscured by spectacle without turning them into new objects of consumption. Genesis 19 serves as a biblical test case, exposing how attention to threatened strangers can coexist with the sexual availability and marginalization of Lot’s daughters. The article concludes by proposing, for homiletics in the coming decade, an attention capable of being interrupted by those already alienated.