I heard a while back that my abstract (see here) for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture conference at the University of Copenhagen had been accepted and I then applied for a bursary to cover the conference fees (£170-200), which I heard a few days ago I got. This means I’ll only have to pay for flights and accommodation.

My husband and I had been hoping to make Copenhagen our holiday this year, having a few nights either side of the conference for sight-seeing etc., but we’ve come to realise that we just can’t afford to both go, which is really sad. 

Greenbelt 2012 it is, then.

I hadn’t thought that I’d be able to get to this year’s Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion conference (poster here), since a) it clashed with a conference in London at which I was already due to present on Poetry and Prayer, and b) it was pretty expensive (£195 reduced rate!) and I’m unemployed.

But I had to withdraw from the London conference anyway (because I’m unemployed and couldn’t afford to go to that either - I also withdrew from the Haunting Memories conference).

So the organisers of ACPR 2012 have asked me to attend as a ‘working delegate’, which is great!

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.’ Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

Back in February, I took part in an online book symposium at Political Theology’s blog, There is Power in the Blog, on Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012). My piece, “The Faith of the Faith/less?”, introduced Critchley’s notion of ‘meontological association’ to frame a tentative answer to my question of how religious collectives might take part in this experiment in political theology; how, in other words, they might become more ‘faithless’ and thereby more ‘faithful’.

Along with the other contributors, (John Reader, Ward Blanton, and Creston Davis), I’m now starting to work this blog post up into an article for the Political Theology journal. Part of this Issue will be an interview with Critchley based on questions raised by our blog posts, so the symposium organiser has asked us to send them in to him today. These are mine:

• As a ‘fiction of association’ and ‘an implied generality’ (40), is the ‘community’ of the faithless a universality that cuts across ‘really existing’ communities, identities and traditions, including across conventional divisions between religion and ‘non-religion’, theism and atheism?
• If so, can religious communities cultivate this faithless faith? In other words, if religious faith can become more faithless and, thereby, more ‘faithful’, how might it become more able to ‘sustain the rigor of faith without requiring security, guarantees, or rewards’ (252)?
• Would, then, you in any way link the notion of ‘the faith of the faithless’, of a form of faith without guarantees, to other theological, philosophical and psychoanalytic conceptualisations of faith, and of the possibility of religion, ‘after the death of God’?
• If not, can religious communities take part in this experiment in political theology at all?

The deadline for our articles is July 1, but I’m not yet sure in which Issue of Political Theologythe symposium will be.

I got an email last night from US publishers Wipf and Stock to say that they’ve accepted my book for publication under their imprint Cascade. It means that I’ll have two monographs stemming from my doctoral research on how the notion of truth is conceptualized in emerging Christian discourse.

The first book, Truth as Event: Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity (forthcoming in Spring 2013 with Ashgate), focuses on truth as an event, tracing this notion as it emerges in the work of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, and exploring how these ‘thinkers of the event’ impact contemporary religious practice within the emerging church milieu.

The second book, currently entitled Post-Secular Theology and the Church: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist (although I keep changing my mind on the main title), focuses on the relationship between Radical Orthodoxy, deconstruction, and emerging Christianity. Here’s some blurb:

Both Radical Orthodoxy and deconstruction have been suggested as theologically apt for emerging Christianity. This book provides an accessible introduction to these ‘post-secular’ theologies, demonstrating how emerging church discourse positions them into narratives to make sense of two divergent forms of emergent religiosity: Deep Church and A/Theism.

Focusing in particular on James K.A. Smith’s ‘Reformed’ Radical Orthodoxy and Deep Church, on the one hand, and John D. Caputo’s deconstructive ‘weak theology’ and A/Theism, on the other, Post-Secular Theology and the Church is about the relationship between institutional religion and the ‘postmodern turn’.

While Smith has distinguished between his own ‘two cheers approach’ to postmodernism and others’ three cheers, Caputo has recently argued against the tendency to settle for ‘an abridged postmodernism’. This book uses emerging church participants’ own words, stories and practices, gathered through interviews, observations, literature and media, to chart some of the ways in which these differing postmodern theologies are impacting lived religion. It details how contemporary Christianity has responded to the postmodern turn to create what Brian McLaren calls ‘a new kind of Christian’ and suggests that such a new kind of Christian is also a new kind of atheist – the ‘a/theist’. 

I’m hoping that it will come out some time in 2013.

Kester asked me a few weeks back to speak at Greenbelt this year (August 24 - 27), and I’ve decided to introduce and reflect on the Atheism for Lent course that I ran at Journey. I’ve just emailed in my presentation title and blurb:

Giving up God for Lent: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist

What did you give up for Lent? In Atheism for Lent, a six week course exploring great atheist critiques of religion, we tried to discover a richer faith in which our own atheisms, our own experiences of the absence of God, are recognised and remembered. Find out what we did, how it went, and why I think a new kind of Christian is also a new kind of atheist.

Here’s a video from Peter Rollins around ideas presented in Chapter 4 of his latest book, Insurrection, “I Don’t Have to Believe; My Pastor Does That For Me”.

I reflected on this chapter in my review of Insurrection for The Other Journal’s “Church and Pomo” blog, “Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to be Led”.

I wondered whether Pete’s “fans” often let him disbelieve on their behalf, focusing on the next book, the next blog post, the next vimeo video, the next speaking engagement on pyro-theology rather than setting fires themselves. 

In his response to my review, Pete recognised the dangers of “I don’t need to doubt; Pete does that for me”.

And this video similarly reflects on the ways in which we disavow doubt, like saying, “I never question God. I only question my understanding of God”.

“Get Lost in order to be Saved”, Jack Caputo audio from Homebrewed Christianity.

Out now by Ola Sigurdson, Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Zizek: A Conspiracy of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012):

Taking its cue from the renewed interest in theology among Marxist and politically radical philosophers or thinkers, this study inquires into the reasons for this interest in theology focusing on the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, as two contemporary prominent Marxist thinkers.

Killing the Buddha have reproduced Nathan Sneider’s “No Revolution Without Religion: Why the Occupy Movement Needs to Occupy Religion” from n+1’s Occupy! The OWS-Inspired Gazette (issue 4).

There was a flash of wisdom in Occupy Wall Street’s controversial and otherwise unsuccessful attempt to occupy a plot of land owned by Trinity Church on December 17 of last year: if the movement is going to last much longer, it is going to have to occupy, and be supported by, faith. By “faith” I mean religion—the more organized the better. “Hey, church,” one could almost hear the Occupiers saying, as they mounted the giant yellow ladder over the fence and dropped down on the other side, “act like a church.” And, this being just a month after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, “We need you.”

The Occupy movement has been largely a white, urban phenomenon, and one with a bit of a tendency toward vanguardism, which makes it not entirely surprising that it’s often blind to the fact that there is no force more potentially revolutionary in U.S. history or in the country today than religion. But the movement remains oblivious to this fact at its own peril. You who are blind, see.

On the other side of the Atlantic, left intellectuals have been starting to discover what they have to learn from religion about revolution. Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben have all written about the apostle Paul in recent years: he stood at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity and was the architect of an underground movement that eventually subsumed the Roman Empire. During the early days on Liberty Plaza, actually, I felt like I was witnessing a glimpse of how Paul described his early church: the holding of all things in common, a single-minded asceticism, and local cells miraculously spreading throughout the known world. Living in societies far less religious than ours, thinkers on the European left are realizing that the loss of religious imagination can mean losing the capacity to imagine and take steps toward a radically different kind of society.

Read the rest here.

Barry Taylor links Slavoj Zizek’s reflections on Occupy and emerging Christianity, to suggest that the emerging church is a “pregnant vacuum”, an opening for the New. The comments include another quotation from Zizek on silence (from both “Burned by the Thing” and Lacan: The Silent Partners, Verso: 2006, p.224), via Adam Moore.

Slavoj Zizek writing for ABC Religion and Ethics (Apr 17 2012): 

[t]he religious suspension of the ethical was already proposed by Augustine who wrote, “Love God and do as you please” (or, in another version, “Love, and do whatever you want” - from the Christian perspective, the two ultimately amount to the same, since God is love). The catch, of course, is that, if you really love God, you will want what he wants - what pleases him will please you, and what displeases him will make you miserable. So it is not that you can just “do whatever you want” - your love for God, if authentic, guarantees that, in what you want to do, you will follow the highest ethical standards.

…However, the ambiguity persists, since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do - in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as the legitimization of the most horrible deeds.

…If the gift of Christ is to make us radically free, then this freedom also brings the heavy burden of total responsibility.

Spent a while looking through photos of solar flares today, like this one from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, as possible covers for Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life (Ashgate, forthcoming 2012). Made my eyes hurt.

This autumn, Verso will publish Slavoj Zizek’s The Year of Living Dangerously.

Slavoj Zizek writing in today’s Guardian.