Video of Ikon’s 2009 Greenbelt transformance art piece, ‘Pyrotheology’, taken by Steve Collins. For the text that Cary and Pádraig are performing, see here.

I was asked to take part in Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat as an academic that could ‘address the wider cultural, political and religious significance of Pyrotheology’ because of my ‘in-depth understanding’ of Pete’s work ‘and the new collectives that it calls for’ (see Pete’s introduction to me on his blog). Having made a few more personal reflections on the retreat (here, here and here), I thought I’d also briefly outline some of the points that I made in my presentation, ‘Positioning Pyrotheology’. I’ll write a bit about the first half of the presentation today, and about the second half tomorrow.

Pyrotheology is a term that was coined by Chris Fry for a transformance art event that Ikon, the Belfast-based collective founded by Pete in 2002, presented at Greenbelt in 2009.

Photo from Pete’s website here.

When Pete began exploring how this word ‘pyrotheology’ might come to describe Pete’s wider theological project, he wrote that ‘the central event of Christianity is nothing less than a type of white-hot fire that burns up all we believe about ourselves, our gods and our universe’.

The pyrotheology website states that,

By theoretically setting fire to the layers of belief we put over reality to protect ourselves form reality, pyrotheology seeks to ignite a sense of greater depth in life beyond the need for wholeness and certainty. Pyrotheology explores how the events testified to in the founding documents of Christianity invite us to fully embrace the reality of our brokenness and unknowing.

For Pete, this means that,

The question for those seeking to build collectives is how to fan the flame rather than trying to extinguish it. In short, how to draw those who attend into the event of absolute loss reflected in the Crucifixion so that they might experience Resurrection.

I’ve already written about two related challenges that I faced at Pete Rollins’ The Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast last week. Because of my religious background and my role as researcher, these were the challenges of moving from intellectual to existential doubt and of moving from information to transformation.

Yesterday, I used Ikon’s transformance art event The End as an example of a moment in which I was able to reflect on the shift from intellectual engagement with ideas to what was literally an instance of ingesting ideas. I said that if, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, belief is unconscious – embodied in our material practices and actions – rather than conscious, we might intellectually or cognitively believe that the end is always already nigh, but in our everyday existence we act as if we don’t know this. Because to really and truly (bodily, materially, existentially) know what we already (cognitively, intellectually) know would be too traumatic.

I thought that, in the moment the dust from the coffin reached my lungs, I made a shift from an intellectual engagement with the idea of death to an existential experience of death and decay, physically ingesting and therefore knowing bodily what had previously been a merely cognitive affirmation.

But as I chatted on Facebook yesterday with others who were at The End last week, and who were left feeling undone by it in different ways, I realised that the level at which I had engaged with this event, and the level at which I am continuing to engage with it, remains an intellectual one.

For example, when I started breathing in the dust, I was still being present as a researcher, trying to distance myself from what was happening and to supress my own bodily reactions to it. I was there going, ‘Don’t cough, don’t cough. You’re a Critic, you’re a Critic. Don’t let people know that this got to you. Don’t let people see this idea sinking into your body’.

And it’s also clear now that my own way of actively avoiding a truly existential engagement with The End was to use the transformance art piece as a whole, and the moment of the dust cloud in particular, as a way of thinking about the relationship between ideas and the material ingestion of ideas!

So, in the end, at The End, I failed.

The opening sequence from Lars von Trier’s (2011) film Melancholia, shown as part of Ikon’s transformance art piece, The End (Apr 23 2013, The Barge, Belfast). 

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.

I thought that posting the programme schedule for the first Subverting the Norm conference (Oct 15-16 2010) might help those at STN2 put the conference in the context of its development from STN1.

On Saturday, I asked how our intended aim of bringing together academics and practitioners had been reflected in the format of both STN1 and STN2, looking ahead to what STN3 might look like in this regard. Yesterday, I wrote about how questions about diversity emerged from STN2. Today’s post will look at the issue of politics, but it will also link back to the two previous posts – in order to continue reflecting on the Subverting the Norm conference series as a whole.

For some reason, it seems that I didn’t post anything on my old blog after returning from STN1 in October 2010. That was probably partly to do with being jetlagged when I came home, but also probably partly to do with a couple of negative experiences at STN1 (most likely made worse on reflection by jetlag!). I already wrote yesterday about how rubbish I felt about my contributions to the roundtable discussion that I took part in. But I also felt patronised by a mature, male PhD student, and had to then be defended by another male PhD student (‘she has got a PhD, you know’).

But in thinking about STN1, I also know that I met some great new people (including Emily Bowen, Matt Gallion, Jeff Robbins, Chris Rodkey, and Phil Snider), finally connected with some people I’d met online (including Adam Moore), and got to spend more time with people I already knew (like Jack Caputo, Chad Lakies, and Pete Rollins). I think that my plenary presentation on Slavoj Zizek’s pneumatology went well. And it was great to see a US example of ‘transformance art’, in the VOID collective’s ‘Revival!’.

Anyway, after searching through piles of notebooks, I found the notes I’d taken from STN1 and Jeff Robbins and Chris Rodkey’s presentation stood out in light of a couple of online conversations about STN2 and the question of politics.

Jeff and Chris’ plenary presentation (and the first presentation of STN1) was entitled, ‘An Emerging Radical Theology: On Politics and Ecclesiology’. (From my notes, I think they were largely referring to both death-of-God theology and deconstructive theology).

In it, Jeff asserted the ‘failure’ of radical theology to influence either wider culture or religious practice. He then stated (and I have this in quotation marks in my notes):

The failure of radical theology is that it has been insufficiently political; there is no radical political theology.

Chris then echoed this by claiming that radical theology has also failed because it is not ecclesiological enough.

Although the theme for STN2 emerged from discussions on Twitter about the relationship between radical theology and ‘confessional theology’ (and Jack’s keynote addressed this a little), as I think about it now, it also feels a little like STN2 took up Chris’ challenge, to explore how radical theology might be ecclesiological, by asking ‘Can postmodern theology live in the churches?’

Perhaps, then, STN3 can take up Jeff’s challenge, to explore how radical theology might be political?

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).

From the Introduction (download PDF for free here) to Political Theology’s special issue (13/2) on speculative philosophies and religious practices, which contains my article, “Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis”:

Katharine Moody… [studies] the work of Zizek and his atheistic speculative philosophy as it might relate to emerging religious practice as represented in the practice of Peter Rollins in particular. Zizek talks about a “God who dies” and the surviving Christian community of believers driven by the Holy Spirit as what remains following Christ’s death. He does, however, tend to suggest that it is only outside the boundaries of institutional religion and churches that this residual revolutionary praxis is to be encountered.

Moody questions this and suggests that Rollins’s emerging transformative and creative movements, as found in Ikon (an emerging church project in Belfast, Northern Ireland), offer an example of an heretical and apocalyptic practice which exists, albeit uncomfortably, both within and beyond institutional boundaries. This is a religious collective, but one that exhibits a “faith beyond religion” and is close to Caputo’s deconstructive theology. Perhaps the crucial characteristic of this movement is that beliefs are held lightly, whilst it is the embodied practices of emerging and often doubt-driven collective worship and activity that are the central aspects of what is now developing.

Whether or not this bears much resemblance to Zizek’s new communist collective is a question that Moody suggests requires further research.

If someone would just give me some MONEY!!!

Link to the new issue of Political Theology (13/2, Apr 2012), which has my article “Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis.” Here’s the abstract:

In the closing chapter of Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek endeavours to “look for traces of the new communist collective in already existing social or even artistic movements.” This article explores what Žižek might see if he were to turn his cultural-critical gaze towards emerging Christianity, which is presented as an artistic and social, as well as religious (or irreligious), “movement.” His work is increasingly used by emerging church practitioner Peter Rollins to retrospectively explain his own thought and practice. This article examines some of the ways in which Žižek’s atheological speculative philosophy and John D. Caputo’s theology of the event are impacting contemporary Christian praxis.

I’ve already heard that my paper for The Power of the Word: Poetry and Prayer (June 29-30, London), “‘My God! My God! Why Have You Forsaken Me?’ Poetry, Prayer and Performance in the Absence of God”, has been accepted (abstract here), but I’m waiting to hear back about Haunting Memories: Unsettled Pasts and Disputed Spaces (May 18, London) and The International Society for Literature, Religion and Culture (Oct 19-21, Copenhagen). These papers are all designed to extend my work on emerging Christian practice and philosophical theology into political theology.

Pete Rollins on the role of the church as poet or singer-songwriter:

we need collectives that are more like the professional mourners who cry for us, the stand-up comedians who talk about the pain of being human or the poets singing about life at local pubs.

This post is another formulation of his thoughts in Chapter 4 of Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine (Howard Books, 2011), “I Don’t Have to Believe; My Pastor Does That For Me,” which I commented upon in my Church and Pomo post, “Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to Be Led.” I wondered whether Pete’s “fans” often let him disbelieve on their behalf, focusing on the next book, the next blog post, the next vimeo video, the next speaking engagement on pyro-theology rather than setting fires themselves - a danger that Pete himself recognizes (see his response to my post, “I Don’t Need to Doubt; Peter Does That For Me”).

Anyway, I’m going to be writing about this understanding of church as poets, singer-songwriters, mourners, and comedians in a paper for a conference on poetry and prayer, entitled “‘My God! My God Why Have You Forsaken Me?’ Poetry, Prayer and Performance in the Absence of God.” See the call for papers (here), my abstract (here), and these reflections, ”The Poet and The Critic: Transformation and Information.”

I just heard back from the conference organisers for “Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities” (Heythrop College, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, June 29-30 2012) that the abstract I submitted was accepted.

My paper (entitled ‘“My God! My God! Why Have You Forsaken Me?” Poetry, Prayer and Performance in the Absence of God’) will mark something of a transition from my doctoral studies on emerging Christian discourse to my (still yet to be funded!) post-doctoral research on emerging Christian practices like transformance art.

I managed to get an abstract in on time for the Poetry and Prayer conference at the University of London (June 29-30 2012). Here it is:

Paper Title: ‘My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?’ Poetry, Prayer and Performance in the Absence of God

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…

Peter Rollins, Insurrection

[T]he church should be like the singer-songwriter we might listen to when we are working through a difficult situation…

This paper reflects on the function of prayer and liturgy, poetry and performance art, in the thought of Peter Rollins and the practice of emerging Christianity.

The 2nd Power of the Word conference (organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies and Heythrop College, University of London) will be on the theme of Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities. (Senate House, University of London, 29-30 June 2012).

Here’s the Call for Papers:

Prayer is the little implement
Through which Men reach
Where Presence—is denied them

Emily Dickinson

The second Power of the Word conference focuses on the theme of poetry and prayer. It seeks to promote further the dialogue, begun successfully at Heythrop College in last June’s conference, between theologians, philosophers, literary scholars and creative writers about the following questions:

What do poetry and prayer share?

How do they differ?

In what ways do they relate to each other?