Lent starts today, so here’s the link again to my Third Way Magazine article, “Giving up God for Lent”.

One of the illustrations from my “Giving up God for Lent” article in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Third Way Magazine. I’m not sure about the metaphor of walking out into the snowstorm of atheism versus returning to The Light of theism. But they definitely are very pretty.

I recently got the new edition (Jan/Feb 2013) of Third Way Magazine, which includes my “Giving up God for Lent” article. I’m pretty pleased with it.

I’ve finally cracked it. I’ve submitted the finished draft of my Third Way article on Atheism for Lent. It took a lot of effort to get right. Here’s the header teaser:

Never mind chocolate - what would happen if we tried purging ourselves of Christianity in the run-up to Easter? KATHARINE SARAH MOODY explored resurrection through an “Atheism for Lent” course.

And the opening paragraphs:

In an upper room, under a converted railway arch, a group of people assemble amidst the shadows cast by the light of candles. This, our Good Friday “Forsaken by God” service, marks the end of our “Atheism for Lent” course. Through the liturgy we have created, we are fixing our minds on an often neglected aspect of the Lenten narrative: on the cross, in Christ’s cry of forsakenness, God experiences the absence of God.

As we approach the festival of Easter, we have been giving up a faith in which God is an instrument for sanctioning our own means and ends, in order to discover a richer and more honest faith in which our doubt, despair and disbelief are recognised and remembered. Because part of the Easter message is that our experiences of the absence of God do not signal our distance from God but, rather, our identity with God who, in Christ, was also forsaken by God. Christ’s crucifixion experience of divine abandonment is the moment that Christianity is revealed as the religion in which, as G.K. Chesterton observed, “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist”.

I’m still struggling to finish the article on Atheism for Lent for Third Way Magazine. I’m finding it hard to pitch it right, to not alienate readers but also to not compromise on the more controversial aspects of the course. I know I’ll strike a balance at some point, but it is definitely taking longer than I thought, and I need to be working on my book. Sigh.

On the back of my Greenbelt presentation this year, “Giving Up God for Lent: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist”, I’ve been contacted by Third Way Magazine to write a short piece about Atheism for Lent for their Jan/Feb 2013 issue. I’m very excited about this, and more than a little nervous, since I’m more used to academic than journalistic writing styles and I’m not particularly familiar with the magazine’s audience. Still, I’ve had some useful suggestions from the Features editor at Third Way and hopefully the finished piece will inspire readers. 

Also, my husband (Simeon Wallis) and I are hoping to pitch an anthology for Atheism for Lent to some popular Christian publishers in the next little while. It’ll include excerpts from philosophers, theologians and researchers of religion from modern atheists (like Freud, Marx and Nietzsche), new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc), secular philosophical interpretations of Christianity (from figures like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek) to what I call the a/theism of people like Jack Caputo. Fingers crossed that we can get the finished manuscript out in time for Lent 2014. 

Link to the new issue of Political Theology (13/2, Apr 2012), which has my article “Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis.” Here’s the abstract:

In the closing chapter of Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek endeavours to “look for traces of the new communist collective in already existing social or even artistic movements.” This article explores what Žižek might see if he were to turn his cultural-critical gaze towards emerging Christianity, which is presented as an artistic and social, as well as religious (or irreligious), “movement.” His work is increasingly used by emerging church practitioner Peter Rollins to retrospectively explain his own thought and practice. This article examines some of the ways in which Žižek’s atheological speculative philosophy and John D. Caputo’s theology of the event are impacting contemporary Christian praxis.

My piece for the online book symposium on Simon Critchley’s new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012). Over the coming months I’ll convert this Political Theology blog post into a Political Theology journal article.

Every Monday for the next few weeks, the Political Theology blog will post responses to Simon Critchley’s new book The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012), starting with my response (“The Faith of the Faith/less?”) on Feb 6. Then we’ll work our responses up into articles for the Political Theology journal.

I’ve been asked to take part in a book symposium on Simon Critchely’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. It’ll take the form of a blog post at “There is Power in the Blog,” and then an article in Political Theology. I think there are going to be 5 or 6 people involved, including Creston Davis and John Reader, as well as the author.

Pete Rollins has responded to my reflections on his book Insurrection in a piece for Church and Pomo entitled ”I Don’t Need to Doubt, Peter Does That For Me.”

In “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 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 anguish in his heart, no music on his lips. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1992, 43; cited in Insurrection, 2011, 73).

I argued that Pete seeks to refuse leadership (pushing us, like the Poet, back into our own participation in the fullness of life, in joy and suffering, in doubt, disbelief and a/theism).

But my concern was with the ways in which Pete’s audience (his “fans”) might flock around him like the Critics who assent cognitively to what he is 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 experiences of real life.

The Church and Postmodern Culture blog are hosting an online book symposium on Pete Rollins’ Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine.

My contribution is first up, “Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to be Led.”

Pete will be responding later this week, and then will interact next week with the next reviewer, Jason Clark.

I just finished writing my response to Pete Rollins’ Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine for Church and Pomo at The Other Journal.

It’s entitled “Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to be Led” and will be posted towards the end of October. But I thought I’d post here some of the quotations that I use in the piece.

…it is not the job [of] the community of faith to offer ways of escaping the suffering that is part of being human (namely the anxiety brought about by the sense of death, meaninglessness, and guilt), but rather to form spaces in which it can be acknowledged and worked through (Insurrection p.179)

In my piece for Church and Pomo at The Other Journal on Peter Rollins’ Insurrection, I might bring in some of Slavoj Zizek’s reflections (in Living in the End Times) on Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People.”

Here’s a monologue for Soprano Saxophone in Bb, composed by Goni Peles, inspired by Kafka’s story.

I’ve just received my copy of Pete Rollins’ Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine, which I’m reviewing for the Church and Pomo blog. Here’s the Introduction and First Chapter. 

The review should be posted on October 24th at Church and Pomo’s new home as part of The Other Journal.

I’ve also recently finished an article which features Pete’s work for a special edition of Political Theology. The article, entitled ”Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis,” should be published early next year.