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 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.

I really enjoyed my interview day at Bristol today.

Yesterday I felt really sick and nervous because I really want this job opportunity to work out. I’d love to be based near my immediate family and many of my school friends, but the more I researched the department itself the more connections I found between the expertise and interests of the staff members and my own aspirations for both teaching and research. In particular, the Department has strengths in philosophical and theological reflection on religious concepts as well as in textual studies, which connects with my work on the notions of truth and subjectivity and my focus on Paul’s letters. They also have the Centre for Christianity and Culture, where my work on emerging Christianity would neatly fit. Also, Bristol has two university-wide research themes that my future research on the reception of Paul’s letters amongst contemporary continental philosophers and on implications for identity politics would contribute towards (Identities and Reception). My work with the “Philosophy and Religious Practice” Impact Network would also contribute to reception studies, since our impact events will explore theories for understanding and methods for measuring the reception of philosophical texts within faith communities.

But the day went great. I felt relaxed and confident, able to articulate myself properly and to show my sense of humour. During my presentation (on “Zizek and Actually Existing Christianity”), the staff and students were really receptive to my research and really interested that I’m holding philosophy of religion together with religious studies. Rita Langer was especially passionate about trying to get undergraduate students to connect the study of texts with the study of how faith communities use texts and about encouraging them to undertake fieldwork. I also really liked chatting with Carolyn Muessig about her research on medieval female mystics and stigmata, since I did work during my Masters degree on a mystic called Benedetta Carlini (she was the topic of my very first conference paper!). And I thought Rupert Gethin’s work on Buddhism, the philosophy of the mind, and mental health would make him a great speaker for our forthcoming “Philosophy and Religious Practices” Network event on “Buddhism and Human Flourishing”. I also really enjoyed talking with a number of other staff, including George Ferzoco, Jonathan Campell and Jon Balserak, as well as some of the department’s current and recent research students.

I usually dread the “interview by lunch” portion of the day, but the staff all seemed really friendly and warm. So now I’m feeling even more nervous, because I really want to work with all these lovely people! 

Having driven down to my Mum’s to celebrate her 60th birthday, I just got an email saying I didn’t get the Nijmegen post-doc job on Paul and continental philosophy. I’m really disappointed. It was such a good fit with my own research experience and trajectory. Gutted. Apparently another candidate had “a better profile” for Nijmegen, whatever that means. I thought I performed okay in the interview, although there was one academic there who just look like he found everything amusing all the time which unnerved me quite a lot. 

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.