I posted a few more personal reflections on last week’s The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast (here and here), which turned out to be more professional (i.e. academic) than I thought because, on reflection, I failed in trying to move from the intellectual to the existential and from information to transformation. But, as Jen summarised in a great comment on one of those earlier posts, ‘We are all in a different place between intellectually protecting ourselves from what triggers the hurts of the past and letting go of past hurts enough to fully experience the present’.

I then posted two pieces about the academic paper that Pete Rollins asked me to present at the retreat, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’, in which I looked at the wider theological and philosophical frame and political the significance of Pete’s work (here and here). My forthcoming book, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices (Ashgate, 2014), will go into much more detail about the relationship between Pete’s work and contemporary deconstructive and materialist theologies, and the research I hope to do next will focus more on the political potential of practices like ‘suspended space’.

But today I wanted to write another personal reflection – although it’s also somewhat professional, because it’s about my style of presentation, and whether or not I can speak to the churches.

In September, Penguin will publish the first in a series of “easily digestible, commute-length books of original philosophy”, starting with Jack Caputo’s Truth: Philosophy in Transit. I first met Jack when I presented a paper on the different notions of truth that are discernible in his weak theology, back in 2008, so I’m really looking forward to this little book on “the many notions of ‘truth’”. Here’s some blurb from the website:

Riding to work in the morning has become commonplace. We ride everywhere. Physicians and public health officials plead with us to get out and walk, to get some exercise. People used to live within walking distance to the fields in which they worked, or they worked in shops attached to their homes. Now we ride to work, and nearly everywhere else. Which may seem an innocent enough point, and certainly not one on which we require instruction from the philosophers. But, truth be told, it has in fact precipitated a crisis in our understanding of truth. 

Arguing that transport is an important metaphor for our uncertain, freewheeling postmodernism age, where any reality is possible, John D. Caputo explores the ways in which science, ethics, politics, art and religion all claim to offer us the ‘truth’, and posits his own surprising theory of the many notions of truth.

I’ve been posting reflections (here, here, and here) on STN2, held at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri at the beginning of the month (Apr 5-6 2013). This has also provided an opportunity to reflect on the development of Subverting the Norm as a conference series as a whole, to look ahead to STN3, and to look back to compare STN2 with STN1. So in this post I want to talk a bit about Subverting the Norm and the emerging church.

At STN1, the theme was ‘The Emerging Church, Postmodernism and the Future of Christianity’ (Oct 15-16 2010), reflecting conference organiser Phil Snider’s interests in the relationships between emerging Christianity and mainline, progressive and liberal churches and traditions. (I typed up the conference programme here).

But I remember being disappointed by Gary Black’s ‘Emerging Church 101’ presentation, which just felt cribbed from Scot McKnight’s introduction to the emerging church as ‘postmodern’, ‘praxis-orientated’, ‘post-evangelical’ and ‘political’ (see this 2006 talk at Westminster Theological College and then this 2007 Christianity Today article where he adds ‘prophetic’).

To be fair, Gary had to introduce the emerging church to an audience of church practitioners unfamiliar with it, as well as to professional theologians and philosophers who were also largely unfamiliar with it.

But I’d been doing empirical research on what I call ‘the emerging church milieu’ since 2006, and it was disappointing (four years on) to still be hearing the same definitions from the same people being quoted uncritically. And disheartening that research being done by the increasing number of scholars interested in a variety of manifestations of ‘emerging Christianity’ wasn’t being referenced either.

In my notes from STN1, I found the following message I’d written to Matt Gallion, who was also doing research on the emerging church: ‘We need Emerging Church 201!’ 

But comparing this ‘Emerging Church 101’ presentation at STN1 and the ‘Emerging Christianity’ panel at STN2 demonstrates the increase in attention being given to this ‘new religious movement’ by researchers of religion.

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).

Jim Kast-Keat’s ir/reverent doodlings on the cover of Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell.

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.

Homebrewed Christianity podcast with Jack Caputo.

Review by Neal DeRoo of J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister’s edited collection about the work of Jack Caputo, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion (Duquesne University Press, 2012), from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013.02.27.

The book as a whole is critical of Caputo’s Derridean ‘religion without religion’, but fundamentally misunderstands the way in which such a ‘religion without religion’ is a form of faith that can be had both with and without (and, therefore, ‘with/out’) the historical determinate religions and spiritualities of the world - which my forthcoming book from Ashgate will make clear. Religion without religion does not, then, amount to a rejection of the propositional truth claims of particular religions, as many of the contributors suggest, but leads to a reconceptualisation of truth itself.

As Neal explains,

…as a ‘way of life’, the truth of religion is verified in its vitality, not its correctness - and there is more than one way for people to live vital lives.

Jack Caputo’s next book, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, forthcoming with Indiana University Press (Sep 2013) is now available for pre-order. I’m very excited to get a mention in his chapter on Slavoj Zizek.

After being propositioned by Pete yesterday, I’ve agreed to speak at the upcoming Idolatry of God retreat that he’s curating in Belfast later in the Spring (I blogged about this event yesterday). Here’s the lovely introduction he wrote for me:

As we continue to work on The Idolatry of God Retreat we realized that we needed someone who could address the wider cultural, political and religious significance of Pyrotheology. Whoever we invited would not only require an expert knowledge of the radical movement in general, but also an in-depth understanding of my own project and the new collectives that it calls for.

As the curator of the event I knew immediately that we needed Katharine Moody. A few emails later and I’m pleased to say that she said “yes.”

Actually, I said “oui, oui”.

With two books set for immanent release (Post-Secular Theology and the Church: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist andRadical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practice) Katharine is a writer, speaker and academic who is making a name for herself as one of the new generation of critical religious thinkers. Working at the intersection of philosophy, theology and religious studies, as well as possessing a deep understanding of lived religion, she is a leading interpreter of my theological project (along with that of John Caputo and Slavoj Žižek) and is thus perfectly placed to bring an added depth and direction to the retreat.

I was really thrilled to be invited and am very much looking forward to it. Go to the Idolatry of God EventBrite page to buy tickets.

Link the a review by Jack Caputo of Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of St Augustine, Jeffrey L. Kosky trans. (Stanford University Press, 2012), from the Notre Dame Philosophical Review.

New book on the topic of theopoetics forthcoming August 2013, Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, eds, Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness (Fordham University Press), containing chapters from Jack Caputo and Catherine Keller. Here’s a brief blurb:

In complex philosophical ways, theology is, should, and can be a “theopoetics” of multiplicity. The ambivalent term theopoetics is associated with poetry and aesthetic theory; theology and literature; and repressed literary qualities, myths, and metaphorical theologies. On a more profound basis, it questions the establishment of the difference between philosophy and theology and resides in the dangerous realm of relativism. The chapters in this book explore how the term theopoetics contributes to cutting-edge work in theology, philosophy, literature, and sociology.

Interview by T. Wilson Dickinson with John D. Caputo, “Education as Event”, from the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.