I just posted a piece by Clayton Crockett and Jeff Robbins on responses to their book, Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New Materialism over at Political Theology’s blog.

Marika Rose’s guest post over at Homebrewed Christianity on privilege.

Seeing yourself through the eyes of others can be transformative, but only if you let their critiques lead you to serious self-reflection rather than dismissal or denial.

A few days ago, Christena Cleveland - the Center for Diversity and Reconciliation keynote speaker at the recent Subverting the Norm II conference - wrote a post in her blog series “Diversity Repellent” (a series about “the subtle but powerful things that we do and say that make diverse people think twice about building community with us”), which reflected on part of what Tony Jones said at that conference.

Under the 5th (“Be loyal to this tribe”) of his 13 points, Tony said, “We have a better version of the gospel than the regnant view of the gospel in the West today”.

Just as Christena did, I took Tony’s “we” to indicate those gathered at this conference - academics and practitioners interested in the relationship between postmodern or radical theology and church practice. But, this form of theology is located within a specific trajectory in western thought. And this heritage means that neither it (postmodern or radical theology) nor we (those gathered at the conference) are particularly diverse (see also this post here where I reflected on the question of diversity after the STN2 conference).

In her post, Christena asks,

How can a gospel that is mostly (if not entirely) interpreted and articulated by a homogenous group of people (in this case, white, well-educated males) be the “better version”? But in a more subtle way, his statement sent a clear and powerful message to all of the diverse people in the room (e.g., women, people of color, people without advanced degrees, etc.). No need to join our movement; we don’t need diverse voices. We’ve already got the best version of the Gospel and we only needed white, well-educated men to figure it out. Diverse people need not apply.

She concludes that,

people of all cultures run the risk of alienating diverse people if they mistakenly believe that their homogenous group has basically figured out how to think, worship and live.

We might say we want diverse people to participate in our group but we are often too enamored with our own culture (e.g., our version of the Gospel) to invite diverse people to influence it. Rather, than actively seeking input from diverse people, we require them to assimilate to and bow down to the dominant culture. This approach might work to attract people who look diverse (in terms of race/ethnicity, etc.) but it will repel people who offer culturally-diverse perspectives.

Responding more to Christena’s choice of visual illustration than perhaps to the substance of her critique, Tony then said, ‘I’m Tired of Being Called a Racist”. He wrote, “Are her words, combined with that image, meant to imply that I am a racist? The answer can only be yes.”

John Reader’s post at the Philosophy and Religious Practices blog about the first network workshop, The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda (May 9th 2013, hosted by the University of Liverpool). 

Link to the text of Liam Jones‘ talk on Catherine Malabou, plasticity and lived religion, presented at the first workshop from the Philosophy and Religious Practices network, “The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” (May 9th 2013, hosted by the University of Liverpool).

Rebecca Catto summarises her talk on Religion and Public Policy, presented at the first workshop from the Philosophy and Religious Practices network, “The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” (May 9th 2013, hosted by the University of Liverpool).

Roger Trigg summarises his keynote talk, “The Privatisation of Religion: Is Philosophy of Religion to Blame?”, presented at the first workshop from the Philosophy and Religious Practices network, “The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” (May 9th 2013, hosted by the University of Liverpool).

“The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” was the first workshop of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded network, Philosophy and Religious Practices. It brought together over 50 delegates from a variety of disciplines working in universities throughout the UK, as well as many non-academics with a vested interest in religion from the local area. Follow this link for a report of the day.

Links to the reflections I posted after Pete Rollins’ The Idolatry of God retreat (Apr 23-26 2013), Belfast:

Reflection 1: From Intellectual to Existential Doubt

Reflection 2: From Information to Transformation, Or, On the Need to Ingest Ideas

Reflection 3: In The End, I Failed

Reflection 4: Positioning Pyrotheology (Part 1)

Reflection 5: Positioning Pyrotheology (Part 2)

Reflection 6: Can I speak to the churches?

Here are some reflections from other participants. In no particular order, and probably still missing a few:

Apr 23-26 2013. Day-by-day reflections from Scott: IoG Day 1: Fight Club, Open Mind and Rehab; IoG Day 2: Peace walls, Funeral by Tillich, some Christians are pricks, and Jay Bakker’s broken record of scandalous grace; IoG Day 3: Rehab, Denial causing Desire, Magic and Others; IoG Day 4: Thoughts on theology and my resulting thoughts on polygraphs and strippers; IoG Day 5: Winding Down; and some Favourite IoG Quotes.

Apr 27 2013. “Gender, Marginalization and Emerging Church Movements” by Stacey. 

Apr 28 2013. “Idolatry of God Event in Belfast” short post by Pete with photos by Sean.

Apr 30 2013. “Belfast and the Idolatry of God” by Barry.

Apr 30 2013. “Sorting out some of my muddled thoughts about IoG13” by Stacey.

May 01 2013. “The Idolatry of God #IoG13” by Dave.

May 08 2013. “Walls” by Sean.

As I was reflecting yesterday, I’m often scared of speaking to the churches, as well as of speaking in more informal situations where I can’t rely on a paper that I’ve written in advance. For example, I’ve had a few conversations with Tripp Fuller from Homebrewed Christianity about being interviewed for his podcast, but it scares me. I wish I was braver than I am. But in response to my reluctance, Abigail Smith sent me a link to this really useful TED Talk by Amy Cuddy on confidence and power poses.

I posted a few more personal reflections on last week’s The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast (here and here), which turned out to be more professional (i.e. academic) than I thought because, on reflection, I failed in trying to move from the intellectual to the existential and from information to transformation. But, as Jen summarised in a great comment on one of those earlier posts, ‘We are all in a different place between intellectually protecting ourselves from what triggers the hurts of the past and letting go of past hurts enough to fully experience the present’.

I then posted two pieces about the academic paper that Pete Rollins asked me to present at the retreat, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’, in which I looked at the wider theological and philosophical frame and political the significance of Pete’s work (here and here). My forthcoming book, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices (Ashgate, 2014), will go into much more detail about the relationship between Pete’s work and contemporary deconstructive and materialist theologies, and the research I hope to do next will focus more on the political potential of practices like ‘suspended space’.

But today I wanted to write another personal reflection – although it’s also somewhat professional, because it’s about my style of presentation, and whether or not I can speak to the churches.

I posted yesterday about the first part of my talk, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’, which focused on some of the radical theology, atheology and a/theology that has influenced Pete Rollins’ wider theological project.

Photo of Ikon’s 2009 Greenbelt performance, ‘Pyrotheology’, from pyrotheology website.

Talking later with someone at the retreat, they asked me why they needed to know this background, and it made me think about why I had chosen to present it. Obviously, I did so partly because that was what Pete had asked me to do. But I also realised that my desire to present some of this history reveals my own preoccupation with reading Pete’s work for information.

As a researcher exploring the impact of continental philosophy and radical theology on everyday religious discourse and practice, I spend most of my time reading for information, tracking the influence of philosophical and theological ideas on the work of people like Pete. But, as I talked about in this other post here, this often means that I miss the ways in which his writing aims at transformation and not information.

So when I reflected on how I’d structured my talk, I realised that I’d focused in the first half on information - on the theological and philosophical heritage of pyrotheology – but had spoken in the second half about the transformative potential that I see in Pete’s work.

Positioning pyrotheology philosophically, I charted a trajectory from Nietzsche’s declaration of the event of God’s death to various theologies, atheologies and a/theologies of the event of God – which you can hear echo in Pete’s pyrotheological project. Positioning pyrotheology politically, however, I then traced the ways in which it has been influenced by what I call philosophies of identity suspension that can be found in the work of figures like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, who see in Paul’s Letters a new form of universalism.

In Galatians 3.28, Paul writes, ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’.

In one of his chapters for Church in the Present Tense, Pete writes that this verse is at its core a form of identity that ‘cuts across political, cultural, and biological divisions, one that involves the laying down of such identities’ (p. 23):

There is neither high church nor low church, Fox nor CNN, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israeli nor Palestinian, hawk nor dove, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, priest nor prophet, fame nor obscurity, Christian nor non-Christian, for all are made on in Christ Jesus (p. 24).

Pete speaks of churches as suspended spaces, in which participants’ identities, including their religious identities, are left ‘at the door’ to create a space of ‘neither/nor’, in which they can explore a different mode of social relation and through which they hope to transform social and political practices outside these liturgical spaces. It is imagined that this suspension of identity can offer a different vision of social, political and economic life in the West – what Pete calls ‘a theatrical performance of that Messianic time when all will be equal’ (The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 178).

The practice of suspended space is charged with political potential by a philosophy of identity suspension that can be found in the work of contemporary thinkers like, Badiou and Žižek.

Video of Ikon’s 2009 Greenbelt transformance art piece, ‘Pyrotheology’, taken by Steve Collins. For the text that Cary and Pádraig are performing, see here.

Video from Simon Gros of 2012’s International Journal of Zizek Studies conference.

I was asked to take part in Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat as an academic that could ‘address the wider cultural, political and religious significance of Pyrotheology’ because of my ‘in-depth understanding’ of Pete’s work ‘and the new collectives that it calls for’ (see Pete’s introduction to me on his blog). Having made a few more personal reflections on the retreat (here, here and here), I thought I’d also briefly outline some of the points that I made in my presentation, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’. I’ll write a bit about the first half of the presentation today, and about the second half tomorrow.

Pyrotheology is a term that was coined by Chris Fry for a transformance art event that Ikon, the Belfast-based collective founded by Pete in 2002, presented at Greenbelt in 2009.

Photo from Pete’s website here.

When Pete began exploring how this word ‘pyrotheology’ might come to describe Pete’s wider theological project, he wrote that ‘the central event of Christianity is nothing less than a type of white-hot fire that burns up all we believe about ourselves, our gods and our universe’.

The pyrotheology website states that,

By theoretically setting fire to the layers of belief we put over reality to protect ourselves form reality, pyrotheology seeks to ignite a sense of greater depth in life beyond the need for wholeness and certainty. Pyrotheology explores how the events testified to in the founding documents of Christianity invite us to fully embrace the reality of our brokenness and unknowing.

For Pete, this means that,

The question for those seeking to build collectives is how to fan the flame rather than trying to extinguish it. In short, how to draw those who attend into the event of absolute loss reflected in the Crucifixion so that they might experience Resurrection.