I heard today that my funding application for a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes was unsuccessful. I’d been so hopeful that I’d be able to have a nice three year chunk of time to study continental philosophy, philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul, the notions of suspension and potentiality, feminist philosophy of religion, and critiques of identity politics. Not to mention three years when my husband and I would finally, finally, know what was happening in our lives. Sigh. I’m really disappointed.

The feedback from the shortlisting panel was that they were ‘very impressed with the quality of [my proposal’s] structure and the richness of its content’. But that, after much discussion, they thought my application ‘had the character of a proposal for a research project which included a monograph rather than [for] a postgraduate research studentship as commonly understood’.

So, in essence, it seems like my proposal was too good.

But Bev Clack and the head of the History, Philosophy and Religion department seem keen to meet up to talk about writing a post-doctoral funding application, and they seem genuine rather than just being placatory after disappointing me about the PhD in Philosophy. So we’ll see what comes of that.

Still no money. 

But at least there’s another funding bid on the horizon.

To celebrate three years of unemployment since I finished my PhD in Religious Studies, I’m applying for a second doctorate, this time in Philosophy, in the History, Philosophy and Religion department at Oxford Brookes University. While this is obviously an attempt to fund my work any way I can, I’ve thought hard about how a PhD in Philosophy will enable me to position myself as a philosopher, as well as a researcher of religion, and I’m really looking forward to working with Bev Clack and gaining more of a grounding in feminist philosophy of religion. As a PhD in Philosophy, my proposal focuses on the philosophical aspects of my work in more detail, leaving aside the empirical study of the emerging church practice of ‘suspended space’ which has been a feature of some of my other research proposals. Here’s some of the final draft:

Introduction

Contemporary philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul argue against identity politics and standpoint epistemologies in favour of a generic humanity or universal humanism. For philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, identity politics fragments humanity into special interest groups competing for recognition within the existing social system, thereby weakening possibilities for political resistance and collective action. However, feminist approaches to religion and politics have traditionally utilised identity politics and standpoint epistemologies in both scholarship and activism. This project asks what a political, feminist philosophy of religion might look like against the backdrop of this ‘turn to Paul’, by examining the relationship between these readings of Paul’s Letters, on the one hand, and feminist philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and approaches to the study of Paul, on the other.

I’ve been trying to get a post-doc project funded for a while now - on identity politics, secular philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul and emerging Christianity (see, for example, this post about it, here). Over the last month, I’ve been mulling over a way of combining this previous idea with more of a focus in the feminist philosophy of religion. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Research Title

Ir/Religion and Society: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Identity Suspension

Introduction

This project examines the relationship between contemporary philosophical interpretations of Paul’s Letters (Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, etc), which argue against identity politics and standpoint epistemologies in favour of a generic humanity or universal humanism, and feminist philosophy of religion and approaches to the study of Saint Paul. It contributes in particular to knowledge of the relationship between philosophy of religion and lived or material religious practices, as well as to debates about political subjectivity and collective political action.

I’ve just sent off my Expression of Interest to Gordon Lynch at the University of Kent, which is a kind of application to apply through Kent to the Leverhulme Trust for a three year Early Career Fellowship. My proposed project is entitled “Saint Paul and the Politics of Identity Suspension”, so I’m really excited that Ward Blanton will be moving to Kent in January. He’s really interested in my project and hopes it gets funded. Fingers crossed others in the department agree and that I get to apply to the Leverhulme Trust through them. Here’s the proposal:

I’ve been quiet this last few weeks as I’ve been preparing for a job interview. I’m off to Radboud University in the Netherlands today, where I’ve got an interview for a post-doc position in Theology and Philosophy, working on a project on faith and reason in Paul’s Letters and continental philosophy. The post-doc sub-project is on how readings of Saint Paul enable reassessments of the notions of attestation and conviction, as well as related concepts like truth by Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben, Badiou and Ricoeur. I’m really excited about this project and really hope I do well in the interview on Thursday. It would be a fantastic opportunity for me. I couldn’t imagine a better post-doc topic unless I wrote it myself, as I’ve already done a lot of work on the concept of truth in European philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, as well as on the relationship between contemporary political philosophy and Saint Paul.

Killing the Buddha have reproduced Nathan Sneider’s “No Revolution Without Religion: Why the Occupy Movement Needs to Occupy Religion” from n+1’s Occupy! The OWS-Inspired Gazette (issue 4).

There was a flash of wisdom in Occupy Wall Street’s controversial and otherwise unsuccessful attempt to occupy a plot of land owned by Trinity Church on December 17 of last year: if the movement is going to last much longer, it is going to have to occupy, and be supported by, faith. By “faith” I mean religion—the more organized the better. “Hey, church,” one could almost hear the Occupiers saying, as they mounted the giant yellow ladder over the fence and dropped down on the other side, “act like a church.” And, this being just a month after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, “We need you.”

The Occupy movement has been largely a white, urban phenomenon, and one with a bit of a tendency toward vanguardism, which makes it not entirely surprising that it’s often blind to the fact that there is no force more potentially revolutionary in U.S. history or in the country today than religion. But the movement remains oblivious to this fact at its own peril. You who are blind, see.

On the other side of the Atlantic, left intellectuals have been starting to discover what they have to learn from religion about revolution. Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben have all written about the apostle Paul in recent years: he stood at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity and was the architect of an underground movement that eventually subsumed the Roman Empire. During the early days on Liberty Plaza, actually, I felt like I was witnessing a glimpse of how Paul described his early church: the holding of all things in common, a single-minded asceticism, and local cells miraculously spreading throughout the known world. Living in societies far less religious than ours, thinkers on the European left are realizing that the loss of religious imagination can mean losing the capacity to imagine and take steps toward a radically different kind of society.

Read the rest here.