The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of (...) an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world. Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement. (shrink)

This collection examines the intersections of religion and "new" materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: what is matter, how does it materialize, and what sort of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity?

We hope—even as we doubt—that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species’ self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing—but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity.This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these (...) traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. With a fresh, transdisciplinary approach, Ecospirit probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism’s questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these original essays explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting. In the midst of planetary crisis, they activateimagination, humor, ritual, and hope. (shrink)

Unlike the nontheological articles, this one must, for the sake of its coherence in this volume, define its basic discipline before its specific feminism can be articulated. Theology, “god‐word,” a term coined by the pagan Plato, became the language game of Christian intellectuals within a century of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. This Jewish life, its premature termination, and the virtually unprecedented spread of the spiritual movement he had initiated managed to attract philosophical minds such as Clement of Alexandria (...) and later, Augustine of Hippo, in the meantime converting the emperor as well. So the philosophical logos of the cultural elite established itself as the discourse of the Christian movement – hence theo‐logos. Indeed, the author of the fourth gospel had already identified Jesus himself as the incarnation of the cosmic logos, the principle of meaningful order for Stoicism, the Word of God for the Jews. This translation of Hebrew metaphor into Hellenistic philosophy prefigured the institutionalization of a set of rationalized symbols as the creeds (in Greek, symboloi) of Christendom. That institutionalization sought at once to organize Christian spirituality around belief, that is, around discursive propositions to which one assents or not; and to homogenize a tumultuous, subversive, and multifarious movement around the political expediency of unifying both Church and Empire. (shrink)

How are we theologically imagining feminism’s further becomings at this juncture of multiple intertwined uncertainties? Aided by a poem by Emily Dickinson, this meditation on a transfeminist potentiality within and beyond Christianity plies a trinity of entanglement, mystery, and multiplicity.

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge—that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this (...) volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt—and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics—the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noëlle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn. (shrink)

It is an honor and a surprise to find myself speaking with you this evening. I have not yet taken direct part in this community of discourse that is gathered in the name of AJTP; but I have operated for decades in the same intellectual neighborhood—or at least universe—and have always been entangled in some margin or other of your intellectual projects. Which projects I understand are not one. You are after all a plurality of pluralists; and you perhaps all (...) inhabit some version of the Jamesian pluriverse, which makes a universe only by getting strung along in an impossible excess of entanglements. “Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull.. (shrink)

Leading scholars explore the relationship between deconstructive theory and process thought.

This essay unfolds within the wider theological project of an apophatic relationalism. The moral intention of political theology, in its progressive hope, takes refuge here in the apophatic folds of a Cusan cosmological mysticism that, in turn, lends depth to a polyvocal Whiteheadian theology. In this paper hope finds itself tangled in the question of religio-political peace, vis-à-vis a specific thousand-year loop of Western history. In the knotty present, this cosmopolitics—with an eye to each new wave of Islamophobia—lives with uncertainty (...) as to the realism of its pluralistically complicated peace-talk. Partners in the pilgrimage of this paper include (with Whitehead) certain political theorists who read him, especially William Connolly and Paulina Ochoa, along with William Cavanaugh, Enrique Dussel, and Eduourd Glissant, who do not. The aim will be to convert—at the level of symbolic resonance at least—what I call the crusader peace complex into the complex conviviality of peace. The pulses of this transdisciplinary exercise (an effort in self-education rather than specialization) will proceed through eight theopolitical vignettes. (shrink)

As a work of constructive theology attentive to the deconstructive edge of theology itself, Cloud of the Impossible offers a contemplative space for fresh transdisciplinary encounters. The ancient apophatic practice here fosters a knowledge tuned to its own currently indeterminate edges. The present conversation surfaces issues of religion in relation to both science and ethics. It effects a multilateral advance in thinking the “apophatic entanglement” by which a relational ontology, with its attention to the materiality of our fragile planetary interdependence, (...) is intensified through a theology of disciplined uncertainty. (shrink)

Beginning from the apocalyptic work, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, this article explores the Christian Apocalypse through dream-reading the imagery in the context of American responses to 9/11. The apocalyptic figures of the Whore, the Messiah and the Beast appear in interaction with each other. Apocalyptic language, like the tension between nationalism and globalization, both deterritorializes and reterritorializes, unleashing the total destructive power of Armageddon on whole populations through war or torture, legitimized through the notions of absolute (...) good and evil. The article ends with ‘Earth Dreams’, an attempt to deconstruct apocalyptic ideas with a theopolitics of ‘just love’. (shrink)