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The Long Goodbye

George Pattison

in Thinking about God in an Age of Technology

This chapter surveys the history of modern radical theology from John Robinson through the theology of the Death of God, to deconstruction and radical orthodoxy. It argues that even when positioning ... More

This chapter surveys the history of modern radical theology from John Robinson through the theology of the Death of God, to deconstruction and radical orthodoxy. It argues that even when positioning itself as answering to contemporary concerns, theology has typically overlooked the technological nature of contemporary society. This undermines any claims theology might have to leadership in the contemporary thought.Less

Introduction: Atheisms Today

Christopher Watkin

in Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux

This introductory chapter argues that the term ‘atheism’ no longer adequately describes the moves being made in contemporary French thought to follow the death of God, and that the term ‘atheism’ is ... More

This introductory chapter argues that the term ‘atheism’ no longer adequately describes the moves being made in contemporary French thought to follow the death of God, and that the term ‘atheism’ is itself an unhelpfully ambiguous word that is used to designate two very different positions, identified as ‘imitative’ and ‘residual’ atheism. Imitative atheism seeks to replace God with a supposedly atheistic placeholder, retaining structures of thought that rely on theistic premises. Following Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s critiques of this thinking, residual atheism seeks to have done with any reliance on theological assumptions or any ‘faith in Plato’.Less

God Is Green; or, A New Theology of Indulgence

Jeffrey W. Robbins

in Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God

This chapter offers a contemporary account of the relationship between theology and energy by examining three vignettes from the early 1970s. The first is the publication of Vine Deloria's landmark ... More

This chapter offers a contemporary account of the relationship between theology and energy by examining three vignettes from the early 1970s. The first is the publication of Vine Deloria's landmark work God is Red, wherein matters of matters of ecology, land, and space were brought to the fore in contemporary theology. The second is the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, wherein it is shown how the failure to provide a sustainable energy policy has contributed to the apocalyptical doom instrumental in the political mobilization of the religious right. The third is the so-called “Nixon Shock,” wherein the collapse of the gold standard can be seen as the equivalent to the death of God.Less

The Incorporation of Truth and the Symbiosis of Truth and Life

Frank Chouraqui

in Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth

This chapter questions Nietzsche’s insistence that our relationship to truth is a relationship of incorporation. Truth is not something to “know” but something to incorporate. The concept of ... More

This chapter questions Nietzsche’s insistence that our relationship to truth is a relationship of incorporation. Truth is not something to “know” but something to incorporate. The concept of incorporation is Nietzsche’s device for overcoming the inside-outside oppositions. Incorporating truth involves that one could “be” the truth, and therefore, that truth may be one of the names of Being, a Being that, therefore, must be considered as able to overcome the inside-outside divide without rendering it meaningless.Less

Living and Dying Under the Double Horizon of the Death of God

Gregg Lambert

in Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy

This statement returns to provide a close reading of Derrida’s seminal lecture “Faith and Reason” in order to situate the different senses of religion that could be said to be returning today.

Metaphysics, Christianity, and the “Death of God” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941)

Holger Zaborowski

in Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 1931-1941

This essays focuses on Heidegger’s relation to Christianity in the Black Notebooks and shows to what extent Heidegger interprets Christianity and what he considers its crisis after the death of God ... More

This essays focuses on Heidegger’s relation to Christianity in the Black Notebooks and shows to what extent Heidegger interprets Christianity and what he considers its crisis after the death of God from within the history of metaphysics and, therefore, from within the history of Being. It argues that analysing his relation to Christianity helps to understand that the Black Notebooks, particularly their highly problematic passages, need to be read against the background of a crisis that has three closely related dimensions: the dimension of his own biography (particularly his relation to Christianity and his Rectorate), the dimension of history and culture of the 1930s and 1940s, and, finally, the dimension of philosophy, or the history of Being, itself.Less

“The World was Paradise Malformed”: Poetic Language, Anthropomorphism, and Secularism in Wallace Stevens

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a ... More

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.Less

Milk of My Tears

Noëlle Vahanian

in The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language

This chapter establishes God, the Word, as the genesis of linguistic reality for a subject. This genesis of linguistic reality happens in the middle of experience, in a borrowed tongue, in a ... More

This chapter establishes God, the Word, as the genesis of linguistic reality for a subject. This genesis of linguistic reality happens in the middle of experience, in a borrowed tongue, in a historical materiality. A theology of language is thus a secular theology and, invoking Kierkegaard, faith is a leap, but into this linguistic reality which has a historical materiality. God, as per Tillich’s formulation, becomes a non-symbolic symbol that participates in ultimate reality, or, invoking Nietzsche, God is dead, is nothing but a word. Oscillating between the wounded or impossible narcissism apparent in Kristeva’s analysis of desire through her interpretation of primary repression, denial, and the act negation essential for the symbolic, and a narcissism that, by way of Deleuze’s reading of Hume, could be construed as satisfied in the sociolinguistic institution of the self, the chapter articulates the difficulty of speaking authentically when desire and the self are constituted in language, and when words-as the word God--can conjure up meaning, but do not always.Less

Introduction

Noëlle Vahanian

in The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language

This introductory chapter defines and situates secular theology as a theology both of and after the Death of God, and as a theology of language after the postmodern linguistic turn. Faith becomes a ... More

This introductory chapter defines and situates secular theology as a theology both of and after the Death of God, and as a theology of language after the postmodern linguistic turn. Faith becomes a lever of intervention, a rebellious no! to living in resignation, on the one hand, and to waiting for salvation, on the other. A chapter by chapter outline of the book provides a panoptic synopsis of the work as a whole, as it introduces the reader to a desiring-speaking-being who’s desire to no end, like poetry, exposes language as a technique and indifference as an apriori of thinking. Theological thinking is thus envisioned as the rebellious expression of love for the here and now against an anthropocentric and phallogocentric worldview.Less

Seminaries in the Storm: Theological Education and the Collapse of SIM, 1967–1968

David P. Cline

in From Reconciliation to Revolution: How the Student Interracial Ministry Took Up the Cause of Civil Rights

The final chapter documents the mainline churches and seminaries in the late sixties experiencing a series of crises in reponse to the great change of the decade. As inner city church membership ... More

The final chapter documents the mainline churches and seminaries in the late sixties experiencing a series of crises in reponse to the great change of the decade. As inner city church membership declined, seminarians sought greater relevance and “authenticity” from their institutions and in their education. In 1968, this was capped off by death of Martin Luther King, and the Columbia Strike and the supportive response at neighboring Union Theological Seminary. As the nation turned its attention outward toward the war in Vietnam and inward toward increasingly volatile urban situtations, SIM was unable to attract needed financial support to continue its growing decentralized program of urban ministry projects, and it disbanded in late spring of 1968.Less

Conclusion: pathologising security through Lacanian desire

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

in Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite

This concluding chapter offers a theoretical reading of the drive to secure within the terms of Lacanian desire. It asks whether there is something thrilling and yet masochistic about the Sisyphean ... More

This concluding chapter offers a theoretical reading of the drive to secure within the terms of Lacanian desire. It asks whether there is something thrilling and yet masochistic about the Sisyphean pursuit of the unobtainable condition known as security. Given that security pursues an impossible immortality, is it indicative of a fantasy of control and order – rather than a teleological, goal-oriented pursuit? And, as fantasy, is this endeavour structured around an eternal recurrence and repetition, rather than the pursuit and possession of a discrete objective? The chapter suggests that the security edifice is pathology, caused by the Death of God and the resurgent salience of death anxiety in a society bereft of promises to immortality.Less

The people in the pews: Silent and betrayed

Patricia Casey

in Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond

Patricia Casey’s chapter argues that up until recently there was no tradition of a questioning laity, or indeed, clergy, in the Irish Church. Centuries of persecution had brought priests and laity ... More

Patricia Casey’s chapter argues that up until recently there was no tradition of a questioning laity, or indeed, clergy, in the Irish Church. Centuries of persecution had brought priests and laity closer, even though they were never viewed as equals. A coalescence of events at home and abroad in the form of the sexual revolution, the rise of Communism, the reforms of Vatican II, created a Western Church where personal choice took precedence over the dictates of Rome. In Ireland, certain myths such as Catholic guilt, the links between celibacy and paedophilia, the death of God, the delusional nature of all religions, began to gain traction. The clerical abuse scandals served to reinforce hostility towards the Church and to add weight to the aforementioned myths, which has resulted in a society that is becoming increasingly impervious to the Word of God. Casey sees the need for Irish people to become educated about their faith so as to be in a position to speak to a secular audience and to find space for their Christian faith.Less

Paul Valéry and French Catholicism:: Recognizing the Context of Renewal

Paul Gifford

in God's Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Paul Gifford’s chapter shines the spotlight on Paul Valéry as a precious witness to French Catholicism of the interwar period. Although an agnostic and skeptic, Valéry was deeply exercised by “divine ... More

Paul Gifford’s chapter shines the spotlight on Paul Valéry as a precious witness to French Catholicism of the interwar period. Although an agnostic and skeptic, Valéry was deeply exercised by “divine things.” Gifford explores how Valéry invites us to think in terms of a broad crisis of culture and civilization, of which the hidden nerve point is the declared or so-called “death of God.” Sharing the same cultural mindspace as a modulating Catholicism taking shape in the 1930s, Gifford shows how Valéry illuminates and often grapples with the shifts and transitions of this phase-change and offers a parallel and rival construct of spirituality, based on a very radical critique of Catholic neo-Thomist orthodoxy in particular. Precisely because he is dissenting, and often in contestatory dialogue with Catholicism, Gifford argues that Valéry provides lateral insight into the directions taking shape within the French Catholic tradition, with some developments maturing only later in the century. Less

Two Ways to Believe

Noëlle Vahanian

in The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language

This chapter distinguishes between two ways to believe in an age of relativism and postmodernism. The first form smacks of fideism, and it is without any other cause besides that of naï ... More

This chapter distinguishes between two ways to believe in an age of relativism and postmodernism. The first form smacks of fideism, and it is without any other cause besides that of naï self-fulfillment. Part of the cult of the self, its expression is “think positive” and its content is self-entitlement. It is an uncomplicated form of belief that has great currency in a consumer-oriented society. A prime example can been seen in the movie Polar Express. The apologue of this major production was that any dream will come true so long as one believes that it will. Hence, this form of belief is also relativistic. The second form of belief is properly postmodern in that its aim is to view the real in the imaginary. The movie Finding Neverland exemplifies this form of belief. Based on the life of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, the movie conflates real life events with imaginary storylines to take the heroine to Neverland or to her death. In this way, the imagination provokes and sustains the distanciation between the subject and her fantasy and brings the real of facticity to the fore by way of an imaginary trope.Less