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.
In 2010, Drury University (Springfield, Missouri) hosted what many of its participants imagined to be the first conference bringing together theologians, philosophers and church practitioners (themselves problematic categories, I know) to explore the relationships between postmodern philosophy, radical theology, and church practice. Many ‘emerging’ and ‘progressive’ Christian events often try to engage with contemporary academic theory but often fail to do so in a sustained or rigorous manner and philosophers of religion, in particular, have been accused of disregarding lived religion in favour of abstract thought (hence my work with this new research network, Philosophy and Religious Practices).
‘Subverting the Norm: The Emerging Church, Postmodernism and the Future of Christianity’ (Oct 15-16 2010) tried to provide space for a genuine dialogue between scholars and church practitioners. Many participants, myself included, felt that this was such an important endeavour that we asked its principal organiser, Phil Snider, to turn this one-off event into a conference series.
Beginning with Twitter conversations in February 2012, Subverting the Norm II (STN2) took shape over the summer, when we identified that an event on the relationship between ‘radical theology’ (or what Jack Caputo calls ‘unabridged postmodernism’) and ‘actually existing churches’ might be the most helpful theme for both practitioners and academics. Over the winter, after a suggestion from Matt Gallion, Phil and I drafted a call for presentations to send out through various academic and church networks, inviting conference contributions (open format) around a set of questions that all asked, in a nutshell, ‘Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?’
In this first post reflecting on STN2 (Apr 5-6 2013) and looking ahead to STN3 (watch this space!!!), I wanted to think about the conference format in relation to our intended aim of bringing philosophers, theologians and church practitioners together.
In other posts, I’ll look at two other questions: diversity and politics (and in further posts I’ll also address other STN2-related things that interest me, like the emerging church).
(Links to other STN2 reflections are being collected by Matt Willis-Goode here).
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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.
Jim and Jes Kast-Keat’s post-‘Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?’ podcast with Krista N. Dalton. Although I didn’t get to meet Jes at STN2, I presented with Jim in a session on Atheism for Lent and Krista moderated both of my sessions (Atheism for Lent, and Psychoanalysis and the Church). I really hope I get to go out to NYC some point soon. These are lovely, lovely people.
I’ve been reflecting on Tony Jones’ “non-response” to Jack Caputo at last night’s Subverting the Norm keynote. Tony was invited to respond to Jack’s talk, ‘Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches? Perhaps’. And many of us were left feeling disappointed that Tony didn’t appear to spend any of the time he had actually responding to Jack’s talk on whether and how postmodern theology might live in the churches as a spook, a spectre. But then I wondered about some parallels with another “non-response” - this time between Jacques Derrida and Hans Georg-Gadamer - and it left me thinking that maybe Tony’s “non-response” to Jack could be a Derridean illustration of “the good will to understand”. First, a little background…
In my 2010 PhD thesis on “emerging Christianity” and the notion of truth, I wrote a little section about how many of the “emerging Christians” that I interviewed evinced a Gadamerian dialogical hermeneutic in which intra- and inter-religious or cross-narratival conversation functions to facilitate mutual learning and transformation in a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). Dialogue is undertaken with other communities and individuals about their interpretations of truth, enabling both parties to “progress” in understanding of and relationship with God.
Acknowledging their positioning ‘this side of the dark glass’, these participants may agree with Merold Westphal when he writes, concerning the plurality recognised by a phenomenological hermeneutics of finitude, that ‘Truth may be one in itself, but the mirror in which we see it dimly is also a prism that renders our grasp of it irreducibly manifold’ (Westphal, ‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth’).
There are clear affinities between such thinking of truth and the frameworks for thinking about the epistemic problems of religious pluralism offered by pluralist theologians of religion, primarily John Hick.
And Hick’s model of dialogue is Gadamerian in its ‘good will to try to understand’, to reach the fusion of horizons in which a momentary consensus is struck between the parties. Intra- and inter-religious, or cross-hermeneutical, conversation partners are ‘all ears’ (Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’), seeking ‘as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating’ (Gadamer, ‘Reply to Jacques Derrida’). Intra- and inter-religious, or cross-hermeneutical, conversation partners are ‘all ears’ (Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’), seeking ‘as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating’ (Gadamer, ‘Reply to Jacques Derrida’).
In this, however, Derrida spies a ‘good will to power’ (Simon ‘Good Will to Understand and The Will to Power’). As Herman Rapaport suggests, Gadamer’s good will to understanding rests on the assumption that ‘we can all hear with the same ears,’ while, importantly, Derrida, like Nietzsche, ‘listens with ears that are attuned to bad will’ (Rapaport, ‘All Ears: Derrida’s Response to Gadamer’). Where Gadamer exhibits a fundamental trust, Derrida is suspicious (Caputo ‘Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism: A Derridean Critique’), for the good will to understand seeks not to encounter the other in their alterity, but to appropriate what the other says in such a way as to make it illuminating or transformative for the self.
In his 1981 encounter with Gadamer, Derrida refuses the dialogical model with which Gadamer presents him. As later commentators have asked, how can the success of this dialogue be judged, especially if the criteria for judging it as a dialogue are precisely what is being contested in the rather ‘non-dialogical’ (Dallmayr, ‘Hermeneutics and Deconstruction’) exchange?
In such as case, as Robert Bernasconi suggests, Gadamer’s assumption regarding the nature of conversation would force Derrida into a strategy of frustration (Bernasconi, ‘Seeing Double: Destruktion and Deconstruction’), a strategy with which he is, nonetheless, both familiar and most comfortable.
The Gadamer-Derrida encounter witnesses a Derrida who is not against dialogue per se, but who engages in what might be called, following Derrida’s logic of the sans, of the X without X, a dialogue without dialogue, dialogue sans a certain Gadamerian model of dialogue as, even only momentary, consensus (Gadamer ‘Hermeneutics and Logocentricism’).
Just as many of the conference delegates at that Derrida-Gadamer encounter, last night we wanted Tony Jones to listen to Jack Caputo and enter into a dialogue about postmodern theology and the actually existing churches. That didn’t happen. But perhaps Tony was actually performing one of the most Derridean moves, illustrating the impossibility of this model of dialogue? Did Tony Jones do a most Derridean, postmodern, radical, thing last night? Did he illustrate a “bad will to dialogue” in order to expose the impossibility of a “good will to dialogue”? Perhaps.
Just a thought as I sit here in bed at 6am, jet lagged.
Tripp Fuller gave you 7 reasons. Tony Jones gave you 10. I give you 75 reasons to attend the upcoming conference on postmodern philosophy, radical theology and church practice, Subverting the Norm II: Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches? (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri):
How can philosophy of religion address its historical disregard of reality? What might a philosophy of material, lived or everyday religion look like?
Call for Papers for a one-day workshop on Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda (abstract deadline March 11 2013), hosted by the Philosophy and Religious Practices Network at the University of Liverpool on May 9th 2013.
Link to the Call for Papers for the new Philosophy and Religious Practices Network event, “The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” (May 9th 2013). Deadline for abstracts March 11th 2013.
I’ve just finalised my presentation title and abstract for the upcoming Subverting the Norm II conference, “Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?” (Apr 5-6 2013, Drury University, Springfield, Missouri).
I’ll be presenting along with Tad DeLay on the topic of psychoanalysis and the church.
My paper is entitled, “A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist: Psychoanalysis, A/Theism and the Philosophy and Politics of Identity Suspension”, and here’s the abstract:
Emerging Christianity has recently been described as a resource for the construction of cultural identity. However, I argue that radical elements within this milieu should be more properly understood as forming part of a wider political rather than social movement, concerned with the suspension of identity rather than with its formation. I introduce the work of Lacanian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, in order to detail the psychoanalytic philosophy of identity suspension that underpins what Pete Rollins calls the emerging church practice of ‘suspended space’. Žižek’s philosophy charges this practice with political potential grounded in a universal humanism rather than in particular communitarian identities, including religious identities. This means that the new kinds of Christians that are emerging ought also to be new kinds of atheists – ‘a/theists’.
Dan and I just submitted an abstract for this “Impact of Religion: Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy” conference, May 20-23 2013, Uppsala University, Sweden. We had a lovely abstract for an organised panel session where we’d give a paper each. The call for papers said 200 word paper abstracts, so we figured we could have 400 words for a panel session abstract. But then I had to butcher it down to this to get it to fit in the designated box (1300 characters) in the online abstract submission system. Grrr.
Panel Session Title
THE IMPACT OF RESEARCH ON RELIGION IN A HUMANITIES CONTEXT
Panel Session Abstract
Humanities research on religion has typically been marginalised, and often for good reason. Its ‘disregard of reality’ (as Brian Clack puts it) is damning when it comes to its lack of engagement with actual religious practices. Yet the wager of this panel is that the Humanities do have much to offer research on religion.
Organised by the UK’s Philosophy and Religious Practices Network, this panel considers not just the impact of religion on society but the social impact of research on religion. That is, what is of interest here is the way in which Humanities research can and should feed back into the everyday lives of religious practitioners and, in particular, what distinctive contribution philosophy of religion and theology can make to concrete religious discourse and practice.
We provide the context for contemporary engagement in the Humanities with lived religion and recent attempts to overcome (especially) philosophy of religion’s famed indifference here, honing in on two specific areas in which philosophy of religion can play a distinctive role in research on religion, society, law and democracy. We then introduce a series of impact events designed to explore how the impact of Humanities research on religion be encouraged and measured.
I’m excited today to be working with Phil Snider on the call for presentations for the second international Subverting the Norm conference, “Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches?” (Drury University, Springfield, Missouri, Apr 5-6 2013). We’re looking for presentations in a variety of formats that explore the relationship between radical theology, continental philosophy and religious practice. Hopefully the CFPs will be up on the website in a few days.
I’m also really glad that Namsoon Kang will be presenting at this conference. I didn’t know her or her work, but the blurb for her forthcoming book Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World (Chalice Press, 2013) looks really interesting:
In Cosmopolitan Theology, Namsoon Kang proposes that cosmopolitan theology embraces and at the same time moves beyond collective identity position and group-based allegiances. It crosses borders of gender, race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Kang offers a vision of a global community of radical inclusion, solidarity, and deep compassion and justice for others. Blending theology with philosophy, she crosses borders of academism and activism, and the discursive borders of modernism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Cosmopolitan Theology sheds a new light both in academia and the community of Christian believers by providing a public relevance of Jesus’ teaching of neighbor-love, hospitality, and solidarity in our world today.
I think that we’ll have overlapping research interests in theology, philosophy and identity politics, so I’m looking forward to meeting her.
