Katharine Sarah Moody

A Plea for Seeing Ourselves as Strange (and probably Racist and Misogynist)

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:31:00 +0100

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.”

Through social media, I’ve had a few different conversations with friends (most of whom were at STN2) about Tony’s response to Christena’s post and, at various points in this post and in his original talk, Tony is patronising (“everyone at the conference - except, it seems, Ms. Cleveland”), presumptuous (as a friend of mine said, “Tony had just gotten off the airplane, and already he was ready to speak for everyone in the room?”) and self-contradictory (as another friend said, “it was funny that Tony’s response [to Christena] was concerned with the grammar he used at STN2. What with all the shit he gives people like [John D.] Caputo over “grammatology” - see Tony’s third point here about language).

In his post, Tony clarifies that, in the STN2 talk,

I was developing a critique of one particular version of American Christianity — one that is, I might say, dominated by men and exclusionary of women — and I was attempting to rally the crowd to fight against that version in the public square with our more progressive, open, inclusionary version.

Both here and here he presents his remarks about being loyal to “this tribe” as referring to the need to “stick together” in the face of conservative Christian theologies: those within progressive/emergent/incarnational Christianities needs to “stick together in spite of our doctrinal/theological/philosophical differences”.

But this reference to sticking together was also in response to fellow (more radical) emerging church figures’ critiques of his work. As another friend pointed out on Facebook,

Sticking together as a theological movement should not preclude critique. Indeed, being part of a postmodern, subversive, radical theological community should be all about welcoming debate, constructive critique, diversity, dissent, and doubt. That’s the difference between an interpretive community that is willing to rework and deconstruct old symbols and signs vs. a tribal or natural community stuck in a defensive posture committed more to loyalty than to radical change. This was not an issue of misheard grammar [which is what it feels like Tony is trying to turn it into], but of what was the affective sentiment felt by at least two of us who did not feel as welcome to the tribe by Tony Jones.

After Tony’s response to Christena’s blog post, others wrote some great pieces about responding to critiques with vehement denials.

In “Tony Jones, Peter Rollins, and the trend of ‘don’t call me racist!’”, Sarah Moon begins by saying,

I’ve noticed a trend among white, straight, academic cis men in so-called progressive or emergent Christianity where calling someone racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. is a bigger problem than the existence of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

She points readers to the comments section of Tony’s post, where Tony replies to a comment about systemic racism by saying that these structures of racism can be dismantled if we “1) stop calling each other racists and 2) stop lecturing people who are just like us”. Sarah is incredulous:

Good news, people of color. Tony Jones has single-handedly solved racism. You all can go home now–Tony’s got this.

And it turns out, people of color, that YOU were the cause of systemic racism the entire time! Who’d have thought? If only you’d quit naming your oppression and speaking your mind, systems of oppression would just crumble to the ground!

As Sarah notes, Tony is not only tired of being called a racist but also of being called a misogynist. At the end of his post, he writes,

Cleveland responded [to my talk at STN2] by painting me as a racist — or at least as someone who “idolizes” my own “cultural group identity.” And anyone who is paying attention knows that calling someone a racist is the most discrediting of all epithets these days.

Except maybe calling someone a misogynist, which I’m also sick of. I’ll post about that next week.

And Sarah also writes about Pete Rollins’ response to her critique of his stance on identity politics (which takes significant cue from what I call “philosophers of identity suspension” like Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou - I’m writing a lot about this at the moment, see this recent post here and the research project I’m trying to get funded here). She wonders,

What’s with this idea that it is calling someone a sexist or a racist or a homophobe that is the problem? These are people who claim, vehemently, that they are not sexist, racist, or homophobic. People who consider themselves progressive, contrast themselves with fundamentalist tendencies toward blatant misogyny, racism, and homophobia.

You’d think hearing someone direct the word “racism” toward them would be a wake-up call. A reminder to practice the humility that they preach, do some introspection, and repent so that they could continue building the radically inclusive kingdom of God.

But so often, it’s not.

Recently I was in Belfast for Pete’s Idolatry of God retreat, invited as an academic who could place Pete’s work in a wider philosophical, theological and political context to help participants explore the significance of pyrotheology and practice (see my reflections on the retreat here). At one point, I was chatting with a member of Ikon (the Belfast-based collective that Pete founded) about times when Pete has been accused of misogyny and sexism. The person I was speaking to said that the “better/best” response would be for him to say, “I probably am”.

This is the kind of approach that Dianna Anderson takes herself, saying in her post in response to Tony Jones that,

Everybody’s a little bit racist… I am white. I grew up in America. Because of that, I am racist and I benefit from racist structures.

She concludes by saying that,

There’s a lot more to be said about the reception and inclusion of people of color within the modern post-evangelical/evangelical/”Incarnational” spheres, but this needs to be the baseline starting point: if you are a white person, you are going to do and say things that are racist. It is a fact of existence. And you are not the arbiter of whether or not something you did was racist (or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or ableist) – the people from those marginalized groups on that privilege are. This feels bad, I know. It’s supposed to.

This understanding of one’s own privilege is the baseline for communicating about race, sexuality, gender, and everything surrounding marginalization. Your privilege will give you blind spots. And you don’t get to determine the lengths of that privilege.

Calling something racist doesn’t halt discussion. Being unwilling and unable to accept it does.

Pete often talks about the importance of seeing yourself and your own beliefs and practices through the eyes of others. Several of the practices that he writes about - and the Evangelism Project especially - are designed to enable participants to see themselves as others see them: “by seeing themselves through the others eyes, they might begin to see things in themselves that were previously repressed”. As Pete says in “I Have Met the Stranger, And He Is Me”, a “genuine encounter with the other” occurs not when we try to domesticate the encounter by making the other a version of me or by excluding the other (or by only focusing on matters of agreement), but rather when we start to see ourselves as other:

we start to see ourselves through their eyes, and instead of seeing their beliefs as monstrous, we start to see our beliefs as monstrous. We see our beliefs as contingent, and historical, and alien, not just to them but to ourselves.

In The Idolatry of God, Pete uses the example of an instance when he was part of a group of friends who were using the word “gay” to mean effeminate, embarrassing or rubbish. When a friend who was also part of that group later told Pete that he was gay and had been deeply hurt by the use of the term over the course of that night, he reflects that:

At that moment I was undone. I wanted to defend myself by pointing out my disgust with homophobia. Yet I could not in all honesty do it. Instead I was brought to silence. I saw myself through the eyes of my friend, and I was shocked by what I saw.

It was only because I was given grace and understanding that I was able to face myself. This was a moment of crisis in which I had to chose whether to defend myself or to acknowledge the truth of what had been presented to me, horrible though it was.

So often we avoid confronting our own prejudices by covering them over and avoiding anyone who might expose them. But it is the other who so often holds the key to our development…

So even though being accused of racism, homophobia, misogyny and sexism might hurt, perhaps the best response is to say,

I probably am those things. Thanks for pointing that out to me. I should really engage with this critique and explore why you think that about me. When/where/how am I being racist/homophobic/misogynist/sexist? How can I address that? How can I change? I hadn’t seen that in myself, but seeing myself through your eyes has helped me to see something that I had repressed.

If seeing ourselves through the eyes of others is to be truly transformative, then we have to let their critiques lead us to serious self-reflection rather than dismissal or denial.

John Reader reflects on the first Philosophy and Religious Practices network workshop (link)

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:30:11 +0100

John Reader reflects on the first Philosophy and Religious Practices network workshop (link):

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).

Malabou and Lived Religion (link)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:09:00 +0100

Malabou and Lived Religion (link):

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, Research on Religion and Public Policy (link)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:04:00 +0100

Rebecca Catto, Research on Religion and Public Policy (link):

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, The Privatisation of Religion - Is Philosophy of Religion to Blame? (link)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:01:00 +0100

Roger Trigg, The Privatisation of Religion - Is Philosophy of Religion to Blame? (link):

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).

Report on The Humanities and Lived Religion Workshop (link)

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:58:39 +0100

Report on The Humanities and Lived Religion Workshop (link):

“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.

IoG13 Reflections Round-up

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:19:00 +0100

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...

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:00:00 +0100

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.

The Idolatry of God – Reflection 6: Can I speak to the churches?

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:00:00 +0100

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.

The question of speaking to the churches is also a nod back to a conference I was recently involved in, ‘Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?’ (Apr 5-6 2013). Because these thoughts have been percolating since then.

In my first post after the STN2 conference, I wrote about the format. Our aim was to bring academics and religious practitioners (a problematic distinction, I know) together to explore the relationship between continental philosophy, radical theology and church practice. As I reflected on STN2, I was also looking ahead to the different ways we could encourage closer collaboration between academics and practitioners at STN3.

But after STN2 I’ve also been thinking more about whether I can speak to both academic and practitioner audiences. And how I can get better at both. Because I’ve lost a lot of confidence being unemployed for three years (and now, while no longer technically unemployed, I’m still massively underemployed) and I think I suck at everything – although, surprisingly, I was quite pleased with how I performed in the roundtable at STN2 and in this video interview afterwards.

Pete and Kester are two people who have really encouraged me to talk more at events outside academia (Kester invited me to speak at Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival last year and has asked me to be part of a ‘radical theology’ stream of talks at Greenbelt this year, which will also feature Jack Caputo).

But Pete said to me at one point last week that, while he and Kester had been talking to each other about how to help me to speak more at events like this, he hadn’t actually asked me if that was what I wanted to be doing!

As someone who’s researching the relationship between continental philosophy, radical theology and lived religion, I want to be able speak at events with religious practitioners. But as someone who has neither a background in church leadership nor extensive experience of teaching in academia (yet), I feel inadequate compared to those who have public speaking expertise in either a church or a university setting.

Photo credit: Dave Magee.

When I first began my doctoral research, I did a lot of presentations at sociology of religion conferences, where it’s much more common to present from notes because of the discipline. But as I moved further into the fields of theology and philosophy, I more often read from a paper – because that was what everyone else did. And because I’m professionally trained in religious studies, rather than in philosophy, I felt more confident talking about philosophy when I had the security of a written paper, than when I have to talk more informally. I don’t tend to trust that I know my material. And I always feel more confident on paper than in person.

Sometimes I’ve wondered whether this comes from a difference between academia and the so-called ‘Christian lecture circuit’ or whatever. In the latter, it seems as though high profile figures do their thinking as they’re writing. First, they produce a book, and then they give talks on the topic once they know what their material is. But as an academic, it feels like I do my thinking through conference papers and other speaking engagements (and I imagine, when I get a job, through research-led teaching), which means that I don’t know my material as intimately when I’m speaking on whatever the topic might be. Then I write a journal article or a book chapter once I’ve worked through my material by interacting with my peers. That may be a completely inaccurate contrast, but it’s what it sometimes feels like.

Lacking confidence in myself might also be another reason that, even when I’ve been asked to talk as a philosopher and/or radical theologian in my own right, I tend to still talk about what other people (other philosophers, other theologians, etc. – often men, as one participant at the retreat noted, given their dominance in the history of Western thought) think, rather than about what I think.

For example, at Greenbelt this year, I’d originally thought of giving a presentation entitled, ‘The Resurrection of Death of God Theology: From New Atheists to New Atheologians’, which would argue that the most fruitful direction for Christianity at the moment isn’t to engage in endless debate with new atheists but to engage with the work of ‘new atheologians’ like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. In thinking about what I was going to do at Greenbelt, I leant towards providing context for the radical theology that I knew people like Kester, Pete and Jack would be doing in their sessions. But why? Probably because it’s safer to merely comment on others than to expose my own original contributions to possible criticism. But, at the same time, the very fact that I therefore rely on others’ work means that I’m less likely to be able to present in an informal manner, because I feel tied to what I’ve already written about what they’ve written, rather than being free to just talk about my own ideas.

As Carl said in a comment on an earlier post about last week’s retreat, ‘There’s a risk with stepping forward and leading, to speak your voice and ideas’.

I want to be able to shift towards talking about what I think rather than what others think. This might also mean that I’ll then feel more comfortable using more casual presentation styles.

So, although this is very scary, I’d like to ask for feedback on my Idolatry of God retreat presentation.

Photo credit: Jen Grove.

I tried to give an informal introduction to myself, using the lens of the relationship between theory and practice to introduce my academic interest in looking at philosophy, theology and lived religion, as well as to explain my presence at the retreat as someone who has been researching emerging Christianity since 2005.

Then my formal presentation consisted of an academic paper supplemented by visuals. I hoped that sparks of recognition would be set off in anyone familiar with Pete’s work as I talked about a variety of radical theologians, atheologians and a/theologians in the first half of the paper and talked about the political potential of his reading of Galatians 3.28, which is grounded in what I call philosophies of identity suspension.

Unfortunately, because of technical issues that meant we started really late, we weren’t then able to spend any time in discussion, looking at some of the radical theology, atheology and a/theology excerpts together, and trying to read them not for information but for transformation. I would’ve liked to try out a focus group method I’m developing for my work with the Philosophies and Religious Practices network, where I’m examining the impact of philosophy on faith communities through a small-scale study of how an inter-faith group engage with philosophical texts - which is something I’ll be talking about next week at the first PRP workshop, The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda.

The Idolatry of God - Reflection 5: Positioning Pyrotheology (Part 2)

Sat, 04 May 2013 09:00:00 +0100

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.

Image: Slavoj Žižek

For Žižek, the political (or materialist) potential of Christianity lies in the fact that it ‘opens up the space for thinking’ the suspension of the big Other, the symbolic Order, the Master-Signifier, God, Father, Big Brother, State – that which provides the illusion of full Meaning. It opens up this space because, for Žižek, Christianity is ‘the religion of a God who dies’ (Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 287). In his atheology, God’s total self-emptying at the Incarnation and self-abandonment at the Crucifixion, is the foundation of a community as God (the Holy Spirit). For Žižek, ‘God is nothing but the Holy Spirit of the community of believers’ (Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 51).

This is the type of collective founded by Saint Paul. For both Badiou and Žižek, Paul forms a new universalism – see especially Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Individuals participate in this universalism participate regardless of their position within the current social situation. Paul proposes the possibility of a political collective that is indifferent to all the other differences that normally structure our social life, whether biological or symbolic. He introduces a new difference into the social order: Christian versus non-Christian.

When Paul says, ‘There are no Greeks or Jews, no men or women…’, this does not mean that we are all one happy human family, but rather than there is one big divide which cuts across all these particular identities, rendering them ultimately irrelevant: ‘There are no Greeks or Jews, no men or women … there are only Christians and the enemies of Christianity!’ Or, as we would have to put it today: there are only those who fight for emancipation and their reactionary opponents; the people and the enemies of the people’ (Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 45).

This difference cuts across all other differences to create a new collective, in which believers uncouple from their particular social identities and roles, from their organic communities of birth, subtracting themselves from all other loyalties and suspending their compulsion to accept their lot in life.

Dying, as Paul would say, to the Law, or to the Socio-Symbolic Order that structures reality, this community forms a new universal collective.

But, for Žižek, a Christianity that ‘draws all the consequences from its basic event’ – from the death of God – is an atheism, without doubt (Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 401 footnote 50).

And yet why must this Pauline universal community be atheistic? Why must, as Žižek contends, the revolutionary political party or the psychoanalytic society be the only forms that the true Pauline community can take? If this community is truly to be a cut across all identities, surely it must be a cut within both theism and atheism?

If there is, as Pete says, a fundamental antagonism not between various distinctions but rather between those who lay all distinctions down and those who hold onto them’ (‘An Economy of Nobodies and Nothings’), then this must be an antagonism that is located between those who lay their theism or their atheism down and those who don’t.

Which means that a truly Pauline community must therefore be neither theistic nor atheistic, but a/theistic. Which is also why my own work argues that John D. Caputo’s a/theism is the proper framework for a Žižekian fighting collective.

For philosophers of identity suspension like Badiou and Žižek, our ability to suspend our various social identities marks the possibility of revolutionary emancipatory politics. And so Pete’s use of these philosophies of identity suspension, which are grounded in a reading of Paul’s Letters, is where I locate in particular the transformative potential of pyrotheology. It’s also what I want to focus on in the research that I’m trying to get funded at the moment.

Badiou and Žižek use their readings of Paul to argue against identity politics and standpoint epistemologies – ways of knowing the world based on where we stand in the world – and in favour of what Badiou calls a ‘generic humanity’ or universal humanism.

Image: Alain Badiou

They bemoan the shift from class struggle to communitarian identity politics. And each regret the move from a politics based on a central economic antagonism, which unites humanity against the existing system, to a politics founded on specific communal identities, which fragments humanity into groups of victims demanding recognition within the system.

While the demand to have one’s identity recognised and valued within the existing state of things is ‘commendable, even necessary’, identity politics is not, for Badiou, properly political. He says,

I would call ‘political’ something that – in the categories, the slogans, the statements it puts forward – is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole (Badiou, ‘Politics and Philosophy’ in Ethics, p. 109).

Žižek concurs:

This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more … the global restructuring of the entire social space (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 248).

In their critique of identity politics, Badiou and Žižek propose something like a political philosophy of identity suspension, but what might a politics of identity suspension look like in practice? As a researcher of religion interested in measuring how contemporary philosophy and theology are impacting everyday religious discourse and practice, I want to explore whether the emerging practice of suspended space represents not only a suspension of identity but a suspension of identity politics and a politics of identity suspension.

I think that examining both the philosophy and the practice of identity suspension in the context of emerging Christianity provides an opportunity to explore the wider significance and potential impact of what I see as the more radical elements within the emerging church milieu.

But it’s also an opportunity to ask important questions about the possibly contested relationship between identity suspension and identity politics, between a politics based on a universal humanism and political thought and action grounded in communitarian identities such as gender, sexuality, race and disability – because the suspension of identity (even a liturgical or otherwise temporary suspension) can strike a disturbing chord for individuals and groups for whom the construction and recognition of identity has been or continues to be the acknowledged aim of political struggle.

Photo credit: Sean Tucker.

Video of Ikon’s 2009 Greenbelt transformance art piece,...

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:57:27 +0100

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...

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:22:43 +0100

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

The Idolatry of God - Reflection 4: Positioning Pyrotheology (Part 1)

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:12:00 +0100

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.

Here’s text from part of Ikon’s 2009 Pyrotheology event at Greenbelt, written and performed by Cary Gibson and Pádraig Ó Tuama, who played Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who by Fire’ underneath Cary’s spoken words (and check out this video of this part of Pyrotheology by Steve Collins):

this is my confession… these are my crimes…

i grew up beneath pulpits. reformed pulpits carved, draped, emblazoned with the image of the burning bush.

burning, yet not consumed. burning, yet living.
but the church was not on fire. not burning. not living. ashen grey. cold. dying.

who by doctrine? who by apology? by schism? by silence? who by exclusion?

and i was dying. firestarters not welcome. not heard. i sat playing with matches in the back pew.

and then i did what anyone would do, what conformity always wanted … i gave up. and i walked.

who by discontent? who by apathy? who by despair? by frustration, and anger, and not being able to take the banal mediocre reasonableness of it all…?

i went looking for a house on fire i could call home…

seventeen pilgrimages have i made to this space… first as disciple… now as radical, as anarchist… i stand here on the margins. without pew. without priest. or pastor.

and for all i have gained from you… for all the answers you have helped me find, now i bring you questions… interrogation… i want to see you burn…

who by irony? who by hierachy? who by the party line? who by the left? who by the right?

who by greenbelt? who by ikon? who by the church?

who am i to set fire to your words, to your pews, to your tents, to your conditions, your public testaments and your private dogmas… your sacred cows, your Gods…?

it is for you to strike the match, if you dare…

i hear you fear. as i once feared. when the wood, the hay, the stubble is burnt away… will there be nothing left?

i no longer fear. i am guilty. for i set fires gladly… at my own feet.

because heresy is nothing
just as doctrine is nothing
as the church is nothing
as greenbelt is nothing
as ikon is nothing.

what is true cannot be destroyed.

what is pure will rise from the ashes.
i need none of this.
i am free.
i believe.

Image credit: Steve Collins.

My task at The Idolatry of God retreat was basically to provide a broader theological, philosophical and political framework within which participants could position pyrotheology. No small feat! So I had to be very selective in what I chose to talk about during my presentation (so, yes, participants ‘listened to a woman talk…about what men had written’).

The first half of my presentation attempted to position pyrotheology philosophically, exploring its heritage within radical theology, which I portrayed as a movement from the death of God to the event of God. The second half of my presentation positioned pyrotheology politically, examining its wider significance and potential impact, moving from what I called the suspension of identity politics of the politics of identity suspension.

My forthcoming book on 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, so in this post I’ll just briefly cover some of the things I mentioned in my presentation on the Thursday night.

Photo credit: Sean Tucker.

I suggested that radical theology might be said to begin in the nineteenth century – the century in which atheism and religious doubt more generally became ‘a central and inescapable feature of the cultural landscape’ (Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism, p. 81), with many of the great atheist critics of Christianity and of Christendom developing their theories of religion (see this series of posts I wrote as material for Atheism for Lent, which focus on figures like Freud, Marx and Nietzsche).

I then very briefly looked at a handful of twentieth and twenty-first century thinkers who have asked what theology and philosophy might look like after the death of God attested to in the work of these and other nineteenth century figures. As Thomas J.J. Altizer has said, ‘If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century, it is a passage through the death of God’ (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 159).

In their book Radical Theology and the Death of God, Altizer and William Hamilton wonder whether ‘the category of “event” will prove to be the most useful answer’ to the question of what the death of God means (p. x). And they ask, ‘If the death of God is an event of some kind, when did it happen and why?’ (p. xi).

I then focused on a selection of figures within radical theology, atheology and a/theology that write about the category of the event in relation to Christianity: Altizer, Badiou, Žižek and Caputo.

In Altizer’s radical theology, the event of Christianity occurs at the Incarnation; it is the event of a transcendent God who dies in order to be born in the immanence and flesh of Jesus at the Incarnation.

But for the radical atheologians Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, the event occurs not at the Incarnation but – for Žižek – at the Crucifixion, and – for Badiou – at the Resurrection.

And in John D. Caputo’s a/theology of the event, the event is not something that happened at the Incarnation, Crucifixion or Resurrection, but something that is going on in them. Further, the event is not the exclusive property of any one historical happening, of any one tradition, community or identity:

An event cuts across the distinctions among the various confessions, and even across the distinction between the confessional faiths and secular unbelief, in order to touch upon a more elemental, if ambiguous, quality of our lives, however this quality is given words or formulated, with or without what is conventionally called religion or theology, with or without what is called literature or politics (The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, p. 4).

Through introducing radical theology in this way, I hoped participants could recognise some of the different ways this work that has been formative for Pete and for pyrotheology. As I said in my presentation, pyrotheology stands on the shoulders of giants (adding: ‘that’s not a joke about Pete stealing material from Kester Brewin; it’s a joke about his height!’).

Photo credit: Scott Studham.

The Idolatry of God - Reflection 3: In The End, I Failed

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:48:00 +0100

I’ve already written about two related challenges that I faced at Pete Rollins’ The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast last week. Because of my religious background and my role as researcher, these were the challenges of moving from intellectual to existential doubt and of moving from information to transformation.

Yesterday, I used Ikon’s transformance art event The End as an example of a moment in which I was able to reflect on the shift from intellectual engagement with ideas to what was literally an instance of ingesting ideas. I said that if, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, belief is unconscious – embodied in our material practices and actions – rather than conscious, we might intellectually or cognitively believe that the end is always already nigh, but in our everyday existence we act as if we don’t know this. Because to really and truly (bodily, materially, existentially) know what we already (cognitively, intellectually) know would be too traumatic.

I thought that, in the moment the dust from the coffin reached my lungs, I made a shift from an intellectual engagement with the idea of death to an existential experience of death and decay, physically ingesting and therefore knowing bodily what had previously been a merely cognitive affirmation.

But as I chatted on Facebook yesterday with others who were at The End last week, and who were left feeling undone by it in different ways, I realised that the level at which I had engaged with this event, and the level at which I am continuing to engage with it, remains an intellectual one.

For example, when I started breathing in the dust, I was still being present as a researcher, trying to distance myself from what was happening and to supress my own bodily reactions to it. I was there going, ‘Don’t cough, don’t cough. You’re a Critic, you’re a Critic. Don’t let people know that this got to you. Don’t let people see this idea sinking into your body’.

And it’s also clear now that my own way of actively avoiding a truly existential engagement with The End was to use the transformance art piece as a whole, and the moment of the dust cloud in particular, as a way of thinking about the relationship between ideas and the material ingestion of ideas!

So, in the end, at The End, I failed.

The opening sequence from Lars von Trier’s (2011) film...

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:43:00 +0100

The opening sequence from Lars von Trier’s (2011) film Melancholia, shown as part of Ikon’s transformance art piece, The End (Apr 23 2013, The Barge, Belfast).

The Idolatry of God - Reflection 2: From Information to Transformation, Or, On the Need to Ingest Ideas

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:40:00 +0100

On the Monday night, during one of the first conversations that I had with other participants at this retreat, I was asked, ‘What’s your background?’ and I said, ‘Religious Studies’. But that wasn’t what the person asking the question meant. She wanted to know more about me and my life, specifically about my religious background, so that she could put some of the ideas about the nature of faith that we’d been talking about over a pint of Guinness into some kind of wider context.

For better or worse, as an academic, I rarely get asked how the ideas I have and the theories I talk about relate to my life, so this personal question made me quite uncomfortable. I hadn’t been expecting to be asked that and I neither wanted to answer nor really knew how to (although many of us ended up sharing our personal stories last week because Pete and Adam created such a safe space for us to do so).

But already on the first day I was faced not only with a question that signalled the difference between the academic conferences that I was used to and this event as a personal retreat but with a question that also hinted at a problem I experienced and thought about a number of times over the week.

Billed as ‘academic Katharine Sarah Moody’, I’d been invited by Pete to bring ‘depth and direction’ to the event through my ‘expert knowledge’ of his work and of its significance within radical theology and contemporary Christianity. So I hadn’t been expecting to have to share much about my own life with the other participants – whereas they had all chosen to be at this retreat about breaking their addiction to certainty and satisfaction, knowing that they might have to place themselves in the vulnerable position of confronting their own brokenness, doubt and disbelief. But I was starting to realise that I might have to put myself in the same position that the other participants had chosen to put themselves in.

I might not just have to answer participants’ questions about Pete’s work, but I might also have to let Pete’s work put me in question.

Photo credit (I think): Adam Turkington, Seedhead Arts

I’ve heard Pete talk a couple of times about how, if we turned off the music and turned up the lights in a nightclub, everyone in there – who until that point had ostensibly been enjoying themselves – would be in tears within minutes, confronting their own and each other’s brokenness. I think the same thing would happen if you ‘turned the lights up’ at an academic conference. Just as clubbers can be enthusiastically engaged in the various rituals that are expected of them as a way of disavowing their brokenness, so too can academics – who engage in a variety of ritual mechanisms that can enable us to avoid confronting ourselves in our own broken humanity.

One of the ways in which I think that, as an academic (as what Kierkegaard called a Critic – see yesterday’s post), I can disavow my experiences of doubt, disbelief, addiction and brokenness is through reading for information rather than for transformation.

Yesterday I mentioned an interaction over at The Other Journal (here and here) between Pete and I on the question of how we can engage with his work at an existential and not merely intellectual level. In my follow-up piece back on my own blog, ‘The Poet and The Critic: Transformation and Information’, I continued to think about whether we as Pete’s audience hope that he continues to suffer. That he continues to experience doubt and disbelief, to write books and parables and blog posts, to give talks, to make videos and iPhone apps – and to organise retreats. All so that his beautiful cries of anguish can experience existential pain for us. All so that we won’t have to.

In other words, I was asking whether we engaging with Pete’s work at an intellectual level, allowing him to affirm doubt and disbelief on our behalf, so that we won’t have to engage with our own doubt and disbelief at an existential level.

After the retreat last week, I can now see that this is probably what I’ve been doing. Pete’s work requires existential not just intellectual engagement. This means that it should be approached not just for information but for transformation. But as an academic researching the relationship between philosophy, theology and lived religion and viewing Pete’s work (and others’) through that lens, it’s really very hard for me to also read his work for transformation as well as for information.

How can I not only observe and analyse but also participate and experience?

How can I move from Critic to Poet?

The need to consider these questions also came to the fore for me as I reflected further on Ikon’s contribution to the retreat. Ikon is a Belfast-based collective, founded by Pete in 2002, seeking to explore religion as a form of life that disturbs the distinction between theism and atheism. On the Tuesday night, they put on a ‘transformance art’ event, entitled ‘The End’.

This event was set on a barge in Belfast. In half the room, there were chairs set out with an aisle down the centre, facing a small stage and a screen. The other half of the room was left empty, with a large clock face marked out on the floor. On the stage was a black coffin, and dead flowers.

We watched the opening sequence to Lars von Trier’s (2011) film Melancholia. Then, as texts including W.H. Auden’s ‘Stop all the clocks’ were heard or seen on the screen, we were invited to come up and pay our respects to the person in the coffin. On looking down into the black coffin, our faces were reflected back to us by a mirror and we were confronted by our own mortality. On retaking our seats, pall bearers stepped forward to take the coffin from the stage in front of us to the centre of the floor behind us. Gathering around the clock face with our candles, we heard pieces that contemplated the impossibility of the future, the futility of our hopes and dreams, and the finality of death. We filled out our own death certificates, lit our candles in darkness and silence, and held each other’s hands.

At first, I found The End rather disappointing. This was the first Ikon event I’d been to in Belfast and I, like many others at the Idolatry of God retreat, had high expectations – as well as reservations, given Ikon’s reputation for not only thought-provoking but also existentially-disturbing events. And while I interviewed six people involved in Ikon back in 2006 for my doctoral research, I’ve only ever been to Ikon events at Greenbelt, which are on a less intimate scale.

But, as Barry Taylor later remarked, a lot of The End revolved around very familiar ideas, images and themes about endings, mortality and death. There were dead flowers, clocks, a black coffin with – no real surprise! – a mirror in it, candles, darkness, Auden, etc. I felt a little as if this was all a little too obvious. As if this event was telling me something I already knew. Yes, we’re all going to die. Yes, the future is radically open, even non-existent. Yes, fine, okay, I know that. Is that all that this event is saying and doing to me?

When someone heavily involved with Ikon later asked me what I thought of The End, I was reluctant to say all this – only to find that he actually had similar thoughts about it being one large cliché.

But drawing merely intellectual assent from us – that we know we’re going to die, that the end is already and always nigh – isn’t ultimately what this transformance art event was about.

The moment that this shift in thinking about this event struck me was when the black coffin was thrown down onto the ground, breaking open and throwing up a cloud of dust, and when a ripple of coughs slowly erupted within the circle during the silence afterwards.

Photo credit: Sean Tucker

Transformance art is a form of performance art that seeks to affect subjective transformation in its participants. But it aims to create a space where an event of transformation can occur not just at the level of intellect but at the level of experience and existence. This means that it isn’t just about new knowledge or a change in awareness, but about an existential event. It’s about both our hearts and our heads, our bodies and our minds.

For Slavoj Žižek, belief can be both subjective and objective, both what he calls a ‘secret inner conviction’ that cannot be admitted fully or publically (The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 298) and something that is externalized, not fully consciously known, and only seen when we attend to our material practices and actions. For him, the form of belief that is ‘characteristic of our times’ is a ‘disavowed/displaced belief’ (The Puppet and The Dwarf, p. 7). This means that what he calls ‘the true site’ of belief is to be found not in conscious acts but in the unconscious, meaning not that belief is ‘deep in me’ but that ‘it is out there, embodied in my practices, rituals, interactions’ (The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 297). Today, Žižek says, belief is not interior, but ‘radically exterior’ (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 31).

In other words, belief is embodied. It is in our bodies and our unconscious, bodily actions, rather than in our minds and our conscious, mind-driven acts (which are also obviously bodily – I’m using a dualism that deconstructs itself) that we truly find what we believe and know.

So when the billowing cloud of dust rose up and slowly reached our lungs, I felt a shift in my understanding of what was going on at this event.

At that moment, The End wasn’t just about an idea that we thought we already knew – one day, we will be dead, we will decay, we will be dust. But it became about allowing our bodies to ingest this idea, letting our bodies know what we already knew. It was about taking physically into our bodies, into our material reality, something that we already know – we’re going to die.

We know that we will one day die, but we do not know that we know this. In our everyday, material actions and interactions, we act as if we don’t know this. This is the difference between the things that we know and the things that we know but don’t know that we know, because to truly know these things, to make them fully known or wholly realised would be too traumatic.

Pete often retells Žižek’s chicken story about a madman who now knows that he is not a grain of corn but who worries that the chickens do not yet know this. While he subjectively (intellectually) knows that he is not a grain of corn, he still objectively believes that he is. And this belief is revealed by his actions – he runs back to his doctor after meeting a chicken who he fears might eat him!

So, in the end, I thought that The End worked really well as a mechanism for encouraging us to experience a moment in which we really and truly (bodily, materially, existentially) know what we already (cognitively, intellectually) know. We ingested the idea of death and decay materially by physically ingesting the dust. We tried to move from intellectual assent to existential experience, to recall yesterday’s post.

But I don’t think that either this moment (the dust cloud) or this movement (from intellectual to existential) would’ve been so powerful for me, or would’ve set me thinking about the relationship between ideas and the material ingestion of ideas, if what had gone on before this moment hadn’t been quite so clichéd. It needed all the familiar images of death and decay that quickly gained our intellectual assent precisely in order to show us that this was merely an intellectual assent to the ideas of death and decay – and not an existential experience of death and decay.

Of course, an Ikon insider told me that this moment had been completely unintentional. They hadn’t realised that throwing down a coffin filled with ash from a fireplace would throw up a cloud of dust and cause us all to start coughing.

So, Ikon: Thought-provoking and existentially-disturbing, even when it happens by accident.

The Idolatry of God - Reflection 1: From Intellectual to Existential Doubt

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:53:00 +0100

Last week, I was in Belfast for Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat, named after his fifth book, The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. The four-day event was designed to enable participants to explore Pete’s work in the city where his theology and practice took shape.

I was asked to give a presentation positioning Pete’s project of ‘pyrotheology’ within a broader cultural, political and religious frame. I’ll briefly outline some of the points I made in my presentation in another post, but in my first few reflections on the event I want to write up some of the ways I introduced myself, my work, and my presence at this retreat to the group before beginning my talk.

I’m from a Church of England background, with the church I was part of as a child and teenager being fairly high Anglican. This is quite different from not only most of the other participants in the Belfast retreat but from Pete himself as well as many other public figures within emerging Christianity, who tend to come from broadly evangelical religious backgrounds.

As with many liberal churches, my church community wasn’t particularly comfortable with changes in form. I remember being frustrated as a young person that we had to fight so hard to get things like alternative worship services once a month.

Image credit: Dave Walker.

Theologically, it felt like we were very comfortable with Jesus’ humanity, with the message of the social gospel, with a historical critical approach to the Bible, and with what might ultimately be called a Christian humanism. But not at all comfortable with experiences of God – or at least a certain kind of expression of experiences of God.

I feel like my church background is primarily intellectual rather than experiential. And a background like this comes with its own very particular baggage when approaching Pete’s work.

In Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine, there’s a chapter called ‘I Don’t Have to Believe; My Pastor Does That For Me’. Here, Pete explains how often the very structures of the church might be said to ‘believe on our behalf’, or – as Slavoj Žižek would say – operate as ‘the subject supposed to believe’.

Pete observes the ways in which church leaders often ‘believe on behalf of the community’, ostensibly freeing the community to doubt and disbelieve but actually serving to shelter the community from the true trauma of Christianity – the loss of ‘all the supports that would protect us from a direct confrontation with the world and with ourselves’ (p.110). This means that, when a pastor confesses doubt and disbelief, a crisis often ensues: ‘Not because the congregation now doubts, but because the pastor’s belief provided a protective psychological dam that held back their doubt’ (p.66). We are able to disavow our own doubt and disbelief, because the church structures believe for us.

But I feel as though the structures of my own religious background – which acknowledged our doubt, disbelief, addiction and brokenness; in short, our humanity – function in a slightly different but ultimately similar way.

Rather than the problem being that the church structures believe on our behalf, the church structures of my own religious background disbelieved on my behalf – which can form another mechanism for disavowing my doubt and disbelief.

What I mean by this is that the structures affirmed doubt and disbelief, encouraged us to acknowledge our broken humanity, were more material than mystical or metaphysical. But they were so at an intellectual rather than experiential level. I was able to disavow my existential doubt through an affirmation of intellectual doubt.

This problem is something that Pete and I have previously talked about, in a symposium on Insurrection for the Church and Postmodern Culture blog at The Other Journal.

In my piece, ‘Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to be Led’, I emphasised Pete’s use of a Kierkegaardian distinction between the Poet and the Critic:

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music …And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful’.And the critics come forward and say, ‘That’s the way, that’s how the rules of aesthetics say it should be done’. Of course, a critic resembles a poet to a hair, except he has no aguish in his heart, no music on his lips.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or, cited in Insurrection p.73

Pete seeks to refuse leadership (pushing us, like the Poet, back into our own participation in the fullness of life). But my concern was with the ways in which Pete’s audience – myself included – might flock around him like the Critics who assent cognitively to what he’s doing, to the importance of doubt and disbelief, but refuse to participate fully in life, to honestly face up to, work through, and celebrate their own real experiences of addiction and brokenness.

In his piece, ‘I Don’t Need to Doubt, Peter Does That For Me’, Pete summarised the problem I raised in this way:

For Moody, my own work can be engaged in this way, offering people a way of celebrating the experience of mystery, brokenness and loss without actually connecting with these realities for themselves.

Pete’s work invites existential not just intellectual engagement. A merely cognitive affirmation of doubt and disbelief, of our own addiction and brokenness, can enable people to avoid existentially experiencing them for themselves.

Over the course of the retreat, I realised that this is something that I have to wrestle with myself – and I’ll write more about this tomorrow.

As an academic exploring in impact of continental philosophy and radical theology on lived religion, Pete’s work is a great case study for this research interest because one of the impetuses behind his own project is to encourage people to engage with contemporary philosophy and theology as a spur for individual and collective practice and subjective and social transformation.

But will I ever fully understand the transformations that occur if I don’t also undergo a similar existential experience? And, because researching transformation isn’t the best way to experience transformation, will I ever undergo transformation if I don’t at some point suspend my role as a researcher and let myself be open to the event of transformation that the practices that I’m researching seek to encourage?

In September, Penguin will publish the first in a series of...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:12:23 +0100

In September, Penguin will publish the first in a series of “easily digestible, commute-length books of original philosophy”, starting with Jack Caputo’s Truth: Philosophy in Transit. I first met Jack when I presented a paper on the different notions of truth that are discernible in his weak theology, back in 2008, so I’m really looking forward to this little book on “the many notions of ‘truth’”. Here’s some blurb from the website:

Riding to work in the morning has become commonplace. We ride everywhere. Physicians and public health officials plead with us to get out and walk, to get some exercise. People used to live within walking distance to the fields in which they worked, or they worked in shops attached to their homes. Now we ride to work, and nearly everywhere else. Which may seem an innocent enough point, and certainly not one on which we require instruction from the philosophers. But, truth be told, it has in fact precipitated a crisis in our understanding of truth.

Arguing that transport is an important metaphor for our uncertain, freewheeling postmodernism age, where any reality is possible, John D. Caputo explores the ways in which science, ethics, politics, art and religion all claim to offer us the ‘truth’, and posits his own surprising theory of the many notions of truth.

STN2 Reflections Round-up

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:19:00 +0100

Links to the four reflections that I posted about Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches? (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri):

Reflection 1 - On the Conference Format

Reflection 2 - On Diversity

Reflection 3 - On Politics

Reflection 4 - On the Emerging Church

See also the abstracts for my two presentations:

Atheism as a Contemplative Practice and Philosophy as a Spiritual Discipline

A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist: Psychoanalysis, A/Theism and the Philosophy and Politics of Identity Suspension

And check out this reflection on Tony Jones’ ‘non-response’ to Jack Caputo (partly our fault - me and Phil Snider - for forgetting to tell Jack that Tony was responding to him, or providing Tony with a copy of Jack’s talk!)

As well as this podcast from Jim and Jes Kast-Keat about STN2,

And this video interview I did with George Elerick right after STN2.

A rough cut of an interview I did after “Subverting the...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:44:00 +0100

A rough cut of an interview I did after “Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?” (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri). George Elerick was asking me questions on behalf of Emigre New Monasticism.

In my first ever interview, I talk mainly about my work at the intersection of philosophy, theology and religious studies, exploring in particular how continental philosophy and radical theology are impacting everyday religious discourse and practice. I also introduce the direction that I want to go in next, looking at the political potential of various philosophies of identity suspension and of the emerging practice of suspended space.

Apparently there were a load of questions that didn’t get asked, so I’ll think about posting responses to them when I get back from this event in Belfast next week.