On the Monday night, during one of the first conversations that I had with other participants at this retreat, I was asked, ‘What’s your background?’ and I said, ‘Religious Studies’. But that wasn’t what the person asking the question meant. She wanted to know more about me and my life, specifically about my religious background, so that she could put some of the ideas about the nature of faith that we’d been talking about over a pint of Guinness into some kind of wider context.

For better or worse, as an academic, I rarely get asked how the ideas I have and the theories I talk about relate to my life, so this personal question made me quite uncomfortable. I hadn’t been expecting to be asked that and I neither wanted to answer nor really knew how to (although many of us ended up sharing our personal stories last week because Pete and Adam created such a safe space for us to do so).

But already on the first day I was faced not only with a question that signalled the difference between the academic conferences that I was used to and this event as a personal retreat but with a question that also hinted at a problem I experienced and thought about a number of times over the week.

Billed as ‘academic Katharine Sarah Moody’, I’d been invited by Pete to bring ‘depth and direction’ to the event through my ‘expert knowledge’ of his work and of its significance within radical theology and contemporary Christianity. So I hadn’t been expecting to have to share much about my own life with the other participants – whereas they had all chosen to be at this retreat about breaking their addiction to certainty and satisfaction, knowing that they might have to place themselves in the vulnerable position of confronting their own brokenness, doubt and disbelief. But I was starting to realise that I might have to put myself in the same position that the other participants had chosen to put themselves in.

I might not just have to answer participants’ questions about Pete’s work, but I might also have to let Pete’s work put me in question.

Photo credit (I think): Adam Turkington, Seedhead Arts

I’ve heard Pete talk a couple of times about how, if we turned off the music and turned up the lights in a nightclub, everyone in there – who until that point had ostensibly been enjoying themselves – would be in tears within minutes, confronting their own and each other’s brokenness. I think the same thing would happen if you ‘turned the lights up’ at an academic conference. Just as clubbers can be enthusiastically engaged in the various rituals that are expected of them as a way of disavowing their brokenness, so too can academics – who engage in a variety of ritual mechanisms that can enable us to avoid confronting ourselves in our own broken humanity.

One of the ways in which I think that, as an academic (as what Kierkegaard called a Critic – see yesterday’s post), I can disavow my experiences of doubt, disbelief, addiction and brokenness is through reading for information rather than for transformation.

Last week, I was in Belfast for Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat, named after his fifth book, The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. The four-day event was designed to enable participants to explore Pete’s work in the city where his theology and practice took shape.

I was asked to give a presentation positioning Pete’s project of ‘pyrotheology’ within a broader cultural, political and religious frame. I’ll briefly outline some of the points I made in my presentation in another post, but in my first few reflections on the event I want to write up some of the ways I introduced myself, my work, and my presence at this retreat to the group before beginning my talk.

I’m from a Church of England background, with the church I was part of as a child and teenager being fairly high Anglican. This is quite different from not only most of the other participants in the Belfast retreat but from Pete himself as well as many other public figures within emerging Christianity, who tend to come from broadly evangelical religious backgrounds.

As with many liberal churches, my church community wasn’t particularly comfortable with changes in form. I remember being frustrated as a young person that we had to fight so hard to get things like alternative worship services once a month.

Image credit: Dave Walker.

Theologically, it felt like we were very comfortable with Jesus’ humanity, with the message of the social gospel, with a historical critical approach to the Bible, and with what might ultimately be called a Christian humanism. But not at all comfortable with experiences of God – or at least a certain kind of expression of experiences of God.

I feel like my church background is primarily intellectual rather than experiential. And a background like this comes with its own very particular baggage when approaching Pete’s work.

I hadn’t thought that I’d be able to get to this year’s Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion conference (poster here), since a) it clashed with a conference in London at which I was already due to present on Poetry and Prayer, and b) it was pretty expensive (£195 reduced rate!) and I’m unemployed.

But I had to withdraw from the London conference anyway (because I’m unemployed and couldn’t afford to go to that either - I also withdrew from the Haunting Memories conference).

So the organisers of ACPR 2012 have asked me to attend as a ‘working delegate’, which is great!

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.’ Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

(Source: adammooreblog)