Søren Kierkegaard used his literary, philosophical, and theological voice to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom. In this effort, he repeatedly uses the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Though some have noted the importance of 1 Corinthians for Kierkegaard, they have not explained this importance nor this letter’s role in Kierkegaard’s corpus. This essay seeks to fill this gap in Kierkegaard scholarship by explaining the role this letter plays in Kierkegaard’s Climacean authorship. Paul’s battle with the Corinthian view (...) of wisdom and Kierkegaard’s battle with Hegelian philosophy, which seeks to go beyond faith through speculative thinking, share similarities that engender both their works. In their battles with their respective foes, both develop a Christocentric epistemology that displaces the import of human understanding and cognitive content with the person Jesus who inverts their opponents’ epistemic values by salvifically redefining wisdom and knowledge. This epistemology of a different kind is an offense, foolishness, and absurd to their opponents because it cannot be intellectually grasped by human understanding, but rather in and through the passion of faith, which places the individual in relation with Jesus. For both authors, this relation is the essential point for the Christian life. (shrink)

All of us working in continental philosophy of religion can be grateful to James K. A. Smith for his call to consider which practices will best further the “health” of the burgeoning subdiscipline of continental philosophy of religion. Given that he offers his suggestions “in the spirit of ‘conversation starters,’” my response is designed to continue what I hope will be an ongoing conversation. With that goal in mind, I respond to Smith by considering not only the practicality of each (...) suggestion but also whether adopting practices he suggests would actually improve the health of the subdiscipline. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to analyze an important decision Brzozowski took at the end of his life, i.e. his late turn towards Catholicism, which, despite his own objections, we should nonetheless call a religious conversion. The main reason why Brzozowski resisted the traditional rhetoric of conversion lies in his often repeated conviction that faith cannot invalidate life, because “what is not biographical, does not exist at all.” Brzozowski, therefore, rejects conversion understood as a radical and abrupt revolution of the (...) soul, which annuls everything that happened before, and turns to a model of religiosity (“Catholicism, undoubtedly”) which preserves his entire biographical past. In this manner, Brzozowski seeks his own formula of faith, more adequate to the “situation” of the modern man who lives in and through History. I argue that the model of “conversion without conversion” Brzozowski chose as representative of modern man is typically, though avant la lettre , post-secular: closer to the Jewish sources of past-oriented tschuva than to the mystical timelessness of traditionally Christian metanoia . The idea that redemption consists not in a liberation of a pure spirit but in a patient working-through of the universal history of creation is an implicit credo of the whole modern age, first fully articulated by Brzozowski and only later in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Brzozowski emerges as a relatively early precursor of the future post-secular option whose advocates, like the author of The Diary , will not allow themselves to “lose a single moment,” either of their lives or the world’s history. (shrink)

This essay is a critical investigation of Heidegger’s insistence on the absolute difference between philosophy, defined as fundamental ontology, and theology, understood as the “ontic” “science of faith.” Focusing primarily on two important works from 1927, “Phenomenology and Theology” and Being and Time, I argue that the distinction between the two disciplines begins to blur in light of the circular character of hermeneutical understanding as Heidegger himself describes it. Ontology, he concedes, has ontic roots in the authentic self-understanding of Dasein. (...) I maintain that this understanding involves an interpretive decision that, lacking the pure phenomenological rationality Heidegger attributes to it, looks much like the faith he would banish from philosophy. (shrink)

THE BOOK TAKES A LARGE NUMBER OF ISSUES WITHIN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY (E.G., ATTRIBUTES OF GOD, ATONEMENT, SACRAMENTS, ESCHATOLOGY); ALLOWS TWO THEOLOGIANS (MOSTLY MODERN) TO PRESENT OPPOSED VIEWS ON THE SUBJECT IN QUESTION; AND THEN ILLUSTRATES HOW THE DEBATE HAS BEEN INFLUENCED BY, OR COULD BE DEEPENED BY, REFERENCE TO CONTEMPORARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF VARIOUS SORTS. THE PHILOSOPHERS DISCUSSED INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING: ADORNO, BARTHES, BENJAMIN, BLOCH, DELEUZE, DERRIDA, FOUCAULT, GADAMER, HEGEL, HEIDEGGER, KIERKEGAARD, LEVI-STRAUSS, LEVINAS, MARECHAL, RICOEUR. THOUGH THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND IS (...) EXPLAINED, THE STRESS IS VERY MUCH ON ASSESSMENT OF THE ARGUMENTS INVOLVED. (shrink)

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly as (...) a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature’s and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity. (shrink)

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that (...) Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself. (shrink)

Can a technological culture accommodate spiritual experience and spiritual thinking? If so, what kind of spirituality? I explore the relation between technology and spirituality by constructing and discussing several models for spirituality in a technological culture. I show that although gnostic and animistic interpretations and responses to technology are popular challenges to secularization and disenchantment claims, both the Christian tradition and contemporary posthumanist theory provide interesting alternatives to guide our spiritual experiences and thinking in a technological culture. I analyze how (...) creational, network, and cyborg metaphors defy suggestions of (individual) animation or alienation and instead offer different ways of conceptualizing and experiencing communion between the material and the spiritual. (shrink)

Nihilism is the logic of nothing as something, which claims that Nothing Is. Its unmaking of things, and its forming of formless things, strain the fundamental terms of existence: what it is to be, to know, to be known. But nihilism, the antithesis of God, is also like theology. Where nihilism creates nothingness, condenses it to substance, God also makes nothingness creative. Negotiating the borders of spirit and substance, theology can ask the questions of nihilism that other disciplines do not (...) ask: Where is it? What is it made of? Why is it so destructive? How can it be made holy, or overcome? Genealogy of Nihilism rereads Western history in the light of nihilistic logic, which pervades two millennia of Western thought and is coming to fruition in our present age in a virulently dangerous manner. From Parmenides to Alain Badiou, via Plotinus, Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, a genealogy of nothingness can be witnessed in development, with devastating consequences for the way we live. Conor Cunningham's elaborate and sophisticated theology, spanning the disciplines of philosophy, science and popular culture, permits us to see not simply how modernity has formulated its philosophies of nothing, but how these philosophies might be transfigures by the crucial difference theology makes, and so be reconcilable with life and the living - with the very gift which being is. (shrink)

Rooted in a tradition of thought and spirituality akin to, yet other than, the onto-theology of the Latin West, the aesthetico-theological experience of the Byzantine icon can help articulate aesthetic and numinous elements of our relation to nature that environmental philosophy should no longer ignore. In contrast to the technical mastery of the natural in Western art inaugurated by the Renaissance, itself related to the emerged technological mastery of nature in the late Middle Ages, the iconic sensibility characteristic of the (...) Byzantine East exhibits an experience of materiality common to non-Western humanity, seeing nature as a visible window to the invinsible, a lintel of the holy. A series of correlations between features of iconic seeing and exemplary encounters with the natural environment by prominent naturalists elaborates this thesis, along with examples from the later writings of Dostoevsky, who looked to divine beauty to save the earth. (shrink)

These original essays reconceive the place of religion for critical thought following the recent ‘turn to religion’ in Continental philosophy, framing new issues for exploration, including questions of justice, anxiety, and evil; the sublime, and of the soul haunting genetics; how reason may be reshaped by new religious movements and by ritual and experience. Contributors: Pamela Sue Anderson, Gary Banham, Bettina Bergo, John Caputo, Clayton Crockett, Jonathan Ellsworth, Philip Goodchild, Matthew Halteman, Wayne Hudson, Grace Jantzen, Donna Jowett, Greg Sadler, (...) Graham Ward, and Edith Wyschogrod. (shrink)

Karl Rahner believed that orthodox Christology is too often perceived as mythology, irrelevant to the lives of contemporary Christians. As a result, he felt, the role of conversion as the gateway to an authentically Christian morality has been neglected. Influenced by existentialist philosophy and life-stage theories that were popular during his lifetime, Rahner established a basis for a new ethical system that would integrate psychological theory and techniques into his theological existentialism in order to provide a cohesive structure within which (...) individuals can be guided towards conversion. It is the purpose of this article to suggest a theoretical framework for Rahner’s proposed “Existential Ethics” and to make some suggestions for its concretization. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that not only does Fear and Trembling espouse the teleological suspension of the ethical as a radical suspension and even possible violation of otherwise ethical duties, but also that Kierkegaard himself espouses it and carries the belief through his entire authorship. A brief analysis of Religiousness A suggests that Climacus made a dialectical error in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This error is corrected by Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard's own journals, and the correction makes possible a (...) full-blooded affirmation of the teleological suspension where Climacus failed. This reaffirmation can explain the shift from Climacus to Anti-Climacus on the topic of hidden inwardness as well as the shift from Climacus to Kierkegaard on the topic of religious suffering. It can also provide a legitimate Kierkegaardian alterative to positing a stage Merold Westphal (and not Kierkegaard) has termed Religiousness C. What we are left with is an uncompromisingly radical religious dialectic that gives every appearance of being exactly what Kierkegaard intended. (shrink)

I characterize controlling pictures or assumptions and concomitants of first modemity and then postmodernity. In brief, these assumptions are the possibility of absolute transcendence of one’s body, language, and culture versus the inescapability of some immanence in the same, of standing in the world. I trace the historical trajectory of the modem spirit and conclude that the move from modernity to postmodemity has been a long, gradual one that continues today. Modern thought increasingly recognized the historical relativity and conditionedness of (...) everything human, yet held on to at least one version of absolutism. Recognizing that all of even one’s own thinking is always incarnate and conditioned is the decisive point for entering postmodernity. The critical and non-critical aspects of the postmodem spirit are described. I next offer an evaluative overview of modern. theology, evaluate two movements in modern theology and philosophy-existentialism and process thought -- with important postmodern elements, and commend liberation theologies for exposing absolutistic assumptions of modem theology. Finally, with some trepidation I evaluate three types of self-consciously postmodern theology (which can find possible or actual counterparts in all the disciplines of the humanities). Radical or deconstructive postrnodernism hypothesizes total immanence in our representations of reality. It alternates between the relativistic standing everywhere of equally endorsing all interpretations and the standing nowhere of nihilism. In its hidden standard of absolute truth and its refusal to (claim a) stand in the world, radical postmodernism reveals itself to be modern rather than postmodern. Conservative posmodemism. or postliberalism emphasizes the importance of enculturation in a tradition. Hypothesizing immanence inincommensurate worldviews, its posture is defensive. Protestant postliberalism, including Radical Orthodoxy, postmodernly claims Christianity as a self-authenticating context of meaning, but then incoherently shifts into the posture of modem or pre-modern absolutism and claims it as the one true religion. Only moderate postmodernism can adequately reflect the postmodern spirit. It charts a course betvveen absolutism and relativism. It gives the critical aspect its due, affirming limited human transcendence. It grants that all persons are rooted in the world, that all are embodied and enculturated in some meaning. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 420-422, June 2012.

Are toleration and pluralism possible in Jewish religion? -- Yeshayahu Leibovitz : the man against his thought -- Leibowitz and Camus : between faith and the absurd -- Jewish religion without theology -- The critique of theodicy : from metaphysics to praxis -- The Holocaust : a theological or a religious-existentialist problem? -- Tikkun Olam : between utopian idea and socio-historical process.

Camus and James are not often thought to have much in common. But both agree that “Is life worth living?” is a fundamental philosophical question, and an examination of the views of each as to what constitutes a life that is worth living reveals striking similarities. Although James freely uses the language of religion which Camus adamantly avoids, they agree that a life worth living is marked by a sense of intimacy and communion with others and with the world itself—and (...) by a resolve to fight against the evils that threaten well-being. (shrink)

In this article, the differences between Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger’s approaches to ontotheology are discussed. Whereas Marion argues for a historical approach to this question, i.e., testing whether ontotheology can be detected in this or that thinker in this history of philosophy, this article aims, with Levinas and Heidegger, for an ontological approach to the question concerning ontotheology. In this regard, this text expresses wonder about Marion’s claim that Medieval theology would not have succumbed to ontotheology whereas (...) ancient and modern did. It is shown that ontotheology, for Levinas as well as Heidegger, might not be overcome with a simple command but rather belongs to the very structure of thought. The article concludes with offering some corrections to the Levinasian ‘God outside of onto-theology’ by a more phenomenological account of being-in-the world. (shrink)

There is much within contemporary continental philosophy that might give the indication that it is really just disguised Christian theology. However, in line with Hent de Vries and in contrast to Dominique Janicaud, I contend that there are reasons for taking continental God-talk seriously on purely philosophical grounds. On this basis, I then go on to advocate a specific form of God-talk-that dealing with kenosis-as being deeply relevant to contemporary politics because of the way in which it provides an argument (...) for democracy as the political system best opened to the critical function of charity. (shrink)

Over the past decade there has been a burgeoning of work in philosophy of religion that has drawn upon and been oriented by “continental” sources in philosophy—associated with figures such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Gilles Deleuze, and others. This is a significant development and one that should be welcomed by the community of Christian philosophers. However, in this dialogue piece I take stock of the field of “continental philosophy of religion” and suggest that the field (...) is developing some un-healthy patterns and habits. The burden of the paper is to suggest a prescription for the future health of this important field by articulating six key practices that should characterize further scholarship in continental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This paper explores the ambiguity in Rudolph Otto's discussion of the mysterium tremendum in order to address a broader set of difficulties in The Idea of the Holy (1917). In doing so, I outline two common criticisms of Otto's position. The first attacks Otto for not providing a secure transition from the numinous experience of terror to the holy experience of faith. The second attacks Otto for upholding a kind of theistic dualism, which seemingly puts his thought at odds with (...) mysticism. Rather than reconstruct Otto's argument in favour of theism, I maintain that numinous experience, while still a form of otherness or alterity, is best characterized as the breakdown of subject-object dualism. I further suggest that this breakdown is best understood in non-theistic terms. For examples of the latter, I briefly turn to Jean-Luc Marion's notion of saturated phenomena. (shrink)

One of the central questions of Jacques Derrida's later writings concerns the sources of religion. At times he gives explicit priority to the universal dimension of religion. In other places, however, he considers the primacy of faith in its concrete, historical context. This paper will clarify Derrida's relationship to universality and historicity by first comparing his notion of "messianicity without messianism" to that of Walter Benjamin's "weak Messianism." After drawing out these differences, I will focus on Derrida's later writings. I (...) will show that much of the ambiguity of Derrida's thinking on religion can be resolved by turning to his work on khōra, the Greek word for "space" or "matter." The rhetoric of khōra can allow us to think through a twofold logic, one that includes the universal/historical distinction and exceeds its alternatives. (shrink)

Atheisms Today -- The God of Metaphysics -- The God of the Poets -- Difficult Atheism -- Beyond A/theism? Quentin Meillassoux -- The Politics of the Post-Theological I: Justifying the Political -- The Politics of the Post-Theological II: Justice -- General Conclusion: How to Follow an 'Atheism' That Never Was.