…my “two cheers” approach [to postmodernism] is meant to be a critical appropriation of postmodernism and deconstruction that walks a long way with Derrida, but parts ways at a critical juncture - not out of a timidity or an unwillingness to “go all the way” but because of a principled critique…
…This is a kind of “two cheers” approach to postmodernism, sometimes mistaken as a “three cheers” stance by critics, as if I wholeheartedly embrace all that is “postmodern”, without critique and without reservation.
…I’m not sure how far one could run with this metaphor, but it strikes me that Merold Westphal and James Olthuis also have a “two cheers” approach (maybe 2.5 cheers), whereas John Caputo and Pete Rollins represent a “three cheers” model.
"I got an email last night from US publishers Wipf and Stock to say that they’ve accepted my book for publication under their imprint Cascade. It means that I’ll have two monographs stemming from my doctoral research on how the notion of truth is conceptualized in emerging Christian discourse.
The first book, Truth as Event: Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity (forthcoming in Spring 2013 with Ashgate), focuses on truth as an event, tracing this notion as it emerges in the work of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, and exploring how these ‘thinkers of the event’ impact contemporary religious practice within the emerging church milieu.
The second book, currently entitled Post-Secular Theology and the Church: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist (although I keep changing my mind on the main title), focuses on the relationship between Radical Orthodoxy, deconstruction, and emerging Christianity. Here’s some blurb:
Both Radical Orthodoxy and deconstruction have been suggested as theologically apt for emerging Christianity. This book provides an accessible introduction to these ‘post-secular’ theologies, demonstrating how emerging church discourse positions them into narratives to make sense of two divergent forms of emergent religiosity: Deep Church and A/Theism.
Focusing in particular on James K.A. Smith’s ‘Reformed’ Radical Orthodoxy and Deep Church, on the one hand, and John D. Caputo’s deconstructive ‘weak theology’ and A/Theism, on the other, Post-Secular Theology and the Church is about the relationship between institutional religion and the ‘postmodern turn’.
While Smith has distinguished between his own ‘two cheers approach’ to postmodernism and others’ three cheers, Caputo has recently argued against the tendency to settle for ‘an abridged postmodernism’. This book uses emerging church participants’ own words, stories and practices, gathered through interviews, observations, literature and media, to chart some of the ways in which these differing postmodern theologies are impacting lived religion. It details how contemporary Christianity has responded to the postmodern turn to create what Brian McLaren calls ‘a new kind of Christian’ and suggests that such a new kind of Christian is also a new kind of atheist – the ‘a/theist’.
I’m hoping that it will come out some time in 2013.
