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).

Having returned from my interview for a three year research position at Nijmegen, I’ve also just submitted an application for a one-year teaching fellowship in philosophy and ethics at Liverpool Hope University. The position is to cover several undergraduate courses, and to contribute to the further growth of the Department of Theology, Philosophy and Religious Studies’ Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. 

I’m already involved in several of ACPR activities, having given a paper at its inaugural conference in 2009, co-edited the proceedings of that conference with the Association’s co-founder, Steve Shakespeare, and contributed material to its online forum on Facebook. And I’ve been asked to take a supporting role in the running of its 2012 conference later this month. I suggested a number of ideas for ways to develop and grow the ACPR’s international profile, so hopefully my application will be strong enough for me to be shortlisted for interview. It would be really great to work alongside both Steve and Patrice Haynes.

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.

Poster for the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion’s second international conference, “Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion”, June 29 - July 1 2012, Liverpool Hope University, UK.