I got my paperback copies of Intensities in the post yesterday. Exploding sun on black looks gooooood.

A hardback copy of Intensities came in the post today. Can’t wait to see the exploding sun on the paperback version!

Download our Introduction, “Irritating Life”, to Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life, FOR FREE.

I’m on a working holiday in Liverpool, being a conference monkey for my friends Steve Shakespeare and Patrice Haynes, who are organising the 2012 Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion conference, “Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion”, which starts tomorrow. On Saturday night we’ll be launching Steve and Patrice’s Ashgate book series, “Intensities: Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion”.

Here’s some blurb from the flyers we’re handing out in the conference tote bags I packed today:

This series sits at the forefront of contemporary developments in continental philosophy of religion. It engages especially with radical reinterpretations and applications of the continental ‘canon’ from Kant to Derrida and beyond, but also with significant departures from that tradition. A key area of focus is the emergence of new ‘realist’ and materialist schools of thought (associated with speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, Zizek, Meillassoux and Badiou), whose potential contribution to philosophy of religion is at an early stage. The series is therefore rooted in a vibrant tradition of thinking about religion, whilst positioning itself at the cutting edge of emerging agendas. This series has a clear focus on continental and post-continental philosophy of religion and complements Ashgate’s British Society for Philosophy of Religion series with its more analytic approach.

Series Editors Patrice Haynes and Steven Shakespeare

Sponsored by The Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion

Steve and I co-edited the first book in the series, Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life (Nov 2012), based on papers from ACPR’s inaugural conference in 2009. Here’s blurb for our volume:

This book breaks new ground in religious and philosophical thinking on the concept of life. It captures a moment in which such thinking is regaining its force and attraction for scholars, and the relevance of thought to social, cultural, political and religious dilemmas about how and why to live.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-4094-4329-2 £18.99

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4094-4328-5 £50.00

Other volumes in the series will be Pamela Sue Anderson’s Revisioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: The Ethics and Epistemology of Belief (Nov 2012), and my own Truth as Event: Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity (Spring 2013).

Spent a while looking through photos of solar flares today, like this one from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, as possible covers for Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life (Ashgate, forthcoming 2012). Made my eyes hurt.

Due to the late withdrawal of a contributor, Steve and I are looking for an additional essay for our edited collection, Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life (forthcoming with Ashgate).

We’re looking for a piece that will fit into either a section on “Life, Death, and Natality,” which examines the potential of philosophical tropes of birth and death to impel the thinker into a more fruitful engagement with life, or a section on “The Politics of Life,” which takes up the way in which the definition and deployment of the category of life plays a key role on questions of political power.

Other contributors include Pamela Sue Anderson, Philip Goodchild, Nina Power, Don Cupitt and Jack Caputo.