On Tuesday, I got back from Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve been for a conference organised by Phil Snider and hosted by Drury University - Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches? (Apr 5-6 2013). Having slept all day Tuesday and been away visiting family on Wednesday and Thursday, I’ve finally got a little time (with my husband going away for a stag weekend in Amsterdam!) to start reflecting on this conference.

Having presented a plenary session on Slavoj Zizek’s pneumatology at the first Subverting the Norm conference (Oct 15-16 2010), this time round I presented two breakout sessions: first, ‘Atheism as a Contemplative Practice and Philosophy as a Spiritual Discipline’ in a session with Jim Kast-Keat on Atheism for Lent; and second, ‘A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist: Psychoanalysis, A/Theism and the Philosophy and Politics of Identity Suspension’ in a session with Tad DeLay on Psychoanalysis and the Church.

I had a great weekend, making new friends, connecting offline with online friends, and meeting back up with friends from STN1. 

The conference was asking, ‘Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?’ but a lot of other questions were raised over the weekend and the week that followed. I’ll be posting about these things in the coming days as I emerge from the fog of jetlag.

I’ll talk about some of the highlights for me (including the closing roundtables and the session on emerging Christianity) in later posts.

For now, I want to thank Phil for all his hard work, as well as everyone else involved, including Matt Gallion, Emily Bowen and Abigail Smith.

And since I already posted the abstract/blurb for my Psychoanalysis and the Church presentation, here’s the one for my Atheism for Lent presentation:

How can atheism be understood as a contemplative practice? How can philosophy be seen as a spiritual discipline? This presentation takes Atheism for Lent as a case study that suggests ways in which the practice of engaging with philosophical critiques of religion by great modern atheists can encourage subjective transformation among faith communities. It introduces a small-scale research project from the UK that examines how reading philosophical texts can impact individual and collective practices.

Holy Atheism for Lent, Batman!

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

Losing my religion. And happy to. REM’s “Losing my religion” in a major rather than minor scale.

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.

By Adam Roberts. “Now that Christianity is the dominant religion on the planet, it is unbelievers who have the most in common with Christ”.

This cartoon by David Hayward (@nakedpastor) neatly illustrates Nietzsche’s characterization of the superiority of Christianity’s slave morality (see these Atheism for Lent posts on Nietzsche: here and here).

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. 

You can now buy my Greenbelt 2012 talk, “Giving Up God for Lent: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist”, either as an MP3 download or on CD. I haven’t listened to it myself yet, partly because I don’t like what I sound like and partly because I’m too scared to find out if they also recorded the Q and A session, which I wasn’t very pleased with. I often have trouble with the questions at the end of a presentation, and I was so nervous giving my first “non-academic” talk that I don’t think I was in the right mindset to deal at all well with the questions I got! So, feel free to download this audio, but please stop it before it gets to the Q and A. Also, I swear in this audio, although I am just quoting Reverend Richard Coles.

Having recently returned from a very soggy Greenbelt 2012, I was both pleased and disappointment by my presentation, “Giving Up God for Lent: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist”. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who packed out the room to hear me talk, which certainly boosted my confidence! But I feel that I let myself down with how I answered the questions in the Q and A. Apparently my talk was recorded, and I’m really not looking forward to hearing it back. I quite often feel that I don’t do myself justice in Q and As. Partly its to do with being relieved the presentation is over and then not being able to concentrate on the question. Partly its being uncomfortable and just saying whatever comes into my head without pausing to really think things through. And I need to get much better at saying “I don’t know”. 

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.

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who undertook some form of Atheism for Lent this year. Maybe you used some of the material I posted here for daily readings. Perhaps you created your own materials for group gatherings. Or you might have decided not to attend church or to try not to pray.

One person who has been giving up God for Lent blogs at Everything is Spiritual.

At the beginning of the Lenten period, he wrote that he was hoping to identify the idol of God that he has created, in order to then ‘find God without the burden of religion… or idolatry’ (Atheism for Lent).