Annual Review Panel Today

Each year the lucky research students of the Religious Studies department undergo a 'review by panel,' to make sure that our thesis actually is a thesis, to keep us on track with writing up, and to act as some kind of a practice for the viva. Mine's today at 3pm. Bit nerve-y.

I usually spend the Easter holidays madly writing stuff to hand in for it. In addition to a self-assessment form, a list of training modules we've taken, a detailed thesis plan, and a timetable for completion, we have to submit a writing sample of at least 5,000 words. I've kind of been going about it the wrong way round; in my first year I handed in about 30,000 (four papers - one on Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, on one Critical Realism and Radical Orthodoxy, one on the postmodernism of the Emerging Church, and a methodological one on the Emerging Church and Critical Realism), in my second year about 20,000 (a paper I gave at a conference on Theo(b)logy and the construction of identity, theology and society, and a chapter on the postmodern turn of Christianity which contextualises my research questions), and in this, my third and (hopefully) finally year, I'm handing in, at most, 7,000 words:

• The "Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy" paper from Boston (3,000 words), and


• A hashing out of ideas concerning a persistent problem with my thesis (about 4,000 words): "Truth, Representationalism, and Research."

This latter piece of writing I hope will stimulate some useful discussion in my panel review, regarding what I see as a BIG HOLE in my project that relates to the underlying philosophical assumptions of the sociology of religion.

My research explores a social phenomenon (the emerging church milieu) through a philosophical question (how is truth conceptualised?). But this always brings me back to this problem:

• Can my research be said to present “the truth,” i.e. the external reality, about how the emerging church milieu conceive of the notion of truth, if many of them (and I) are sceptical about


• a) the extent to which reality can be represented in language (representationalism) and


• b) the extent to which truth is a correspondence between language and reality (correspondence theory of truth)?

See my persistent problem?

So I'm trying to think through the ways in which I can acknowledge this problem and address the difficulties in combining sociology of religion with post-strucutralist philosophies concerning truth, representation, and research. And I'm circling around several literary devices which might help me in this endeavour. I could...

• "Translate" the rather dry, concise, representationalist, and (of course, given it's history) scientific sociological discourse into Derridean vocabulary and syntax - a both daunting and exciting proposition; OR

• Write the different chapters (sociological, philosophical, etc.) in the language of their respective disciplines and allow the resultant jolt when reading from chapter to chapter to occur as an event in the reading experience which might highlight that the different disciplines are operating within different language games; OR

• Attempt to produce different introductions for readers with different understandings of truth (a little like Brian McLaren writes introductory paragraphs for different readers of his Generous Orthodoxy) - for example, readers who hold a correspondence theory of truth, which can be said to be the majority of conservative emerging church critics, might assume that my writings relate fully to the reality that is the emerging church milieu. If such readers do not like what they read, they can either question my academic credentials and research abilities (i.e. the methods I used to discover reality), or they can use my research for further evidence of the dangers of post-modernism. Either way, for them, there is a “truth” of the emerging church out there, waiting to (certainly) be discovered by (perhaps) more astute or discerning (or “biblical”) researchers than me.

What I've decided to do is to write a sociological chapter enumerating what I see as six ideological commitments open to those involved in the emerging church milieu - a classical sociological approach to a social fact.

But, simultaneously, I am going to problematise a number of the assumptions just made in such an approach to the emerging church milieu. There are, however, still a number of ways in which to present this "undercut."

• I could include what could be called an Interlude between this sociological chapter and the rest of the thesis chapters - considering the other alternatives, this option is a bit tame (!) and Derrida's work suggests a further two possibilities.

• In Derrida's (1986) Glas, the pages are divided into two columns, each column taking a different subject matter, so that the reader has to decide whether or not to read all of one first and then return to the beginning of the book and read all of the other.

• Writing alongside (or, rather, below!) Geoffrey Bennington's "Derridabase," intended to systematize Derrida's work, Derrida has constructed another piece of writing, "Circumfession," intended to slip out of such an endeavour. "Derridabase" occupies the top of the pages, whilst "Circumfession" is positioned on the bottom of each.

• Taking into consideration the format of the doctoral thesis, however, a fourth possibility presents itself:

Doctoral theses are printed only on one side of the page, on the right, with a blank page (the back of the preceding page) opposite it on the left. Pagination ignores these blank pages, with readers only paying attention to the pages with words on them as they turn and read. I have decided, therefore, to write a piece which delivers a post-structuralist blow to the sociology of religion and to print it on the pages opposite to the sociological Chapter One, Emergence. The reader will, first (foremost?), be shocked to find print on this side of the bound thesis, and will then have to decide which way to read it: sociology, then critique?; or critique first?

Conference Paper taken out of the Blogosphere

I've decided not to post in too much detail about the "Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy" paper I gave recently, as I'm concerned about putting my ideas out there when I hope to publish in academic journals and monograph form later this year / next year. So I've decided to delete the earlier posts I wrote in which I detailed what I argued. I hope readers understand.

I'm going to blog very briefly back at the original post (here) about what I argued and about the responses I got to the paper.

Please email me at k.moody1@lancaster.ac.uk if you would like to read the paper, and I'll happily send you a copy.

A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist: Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy in the Emerging Church Milieu - part two

This post has been deleted. I feel that it went into too much detail concerning what I argued in my recent conference paper, and therefore threatened the publication of the paper in journal or monograph form later this year / next year. I hope readers understand.

Back at the original post (here), I blog very briefly about what I argued and about the responses I got from other conference delegates.

Please feel free to email me at k.moody1@lancaster.ac.uk if you would like to read the paper in its entirety.

A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist: Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy in the Emerging Church Milieu - part one

[update: this post has been edited, to remove too much detail about my paper - which threatened the paper's later publication in journal and/or monograph form. If you would like to read the paper, please email me at k.moody1@lancaster.ac.uk and I would be happy to send you a copy]

My paper at the "Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism" conference went well.

I was nervous. I'd been imagining large the large auditoriums you see in films set on American university campuses, but the room wasn't too big and was all on one level - although I did have to stand up to deliver the paper, which I've never done before. I've also never really READ a paper. I usually do papers based on PowerPoint presentations and just talk. Then I sort of write the paper after I've presented it, so it was a bit odd for me to have to read something out. I hope my presentation skills were up to it! Early on, I decided to play the (always useful) postgraduate student card - conference delegates tend to be easier on us PGs. I decided to emphasise my cute Britishness too. It seemed to work.

First off, I introduced my project, exploring the UK emerging church milieu through the question of how truth is conceptualised. And explained the impetus of this focus in relation to critics' claims that the emerging church is departing from the biblical notion of truth as correspondence.

Then I read the paper. I posted my introduction in an early post, so here I'll just briefly make my main arguments and blog about the responses I got from other conference delegates:

Primarily, my paper argued that there is slippage in the work of Jack Caputo between the ways in which he conceptualises the notion of truth. However, I demonstrated that this slippage is a functional necessity of his weak theology. Although he slides away from a wholly performative notion of truth (as event, as confession, as weeping, as praying) towards truth justice - as a telos and as an adequatio (regardless of whether this telos can ever be known or whether it's equation to reality can ever come about) - this slide mirrors a key feature of Caputo's theology of the event: the slippery distinction between wholly other, undeconstructible messianic structures (truth as event and circumfession) and determinate messianisms (justice, hospitality, gift, forgiveness and the kingdom of the kingdomless).

Secondly, my paper situated this argument in the context of ethnographic data from the UK emerging church milieu, in which may participants are increasingly drawn to continental philosophy and deconstructive theology. I demonstrated that the understandings of truth discernable in Caputo's work can also be observed in the conversations I have had with a wide range of people within the emerging church milieu. In particular, I link the a/theism advocated by Caputo to an understanding of pragmatic orthodoxy which arises from within the UK emerging church milieu. This reformulation of orthodoxy moves away from right belief and towards believing in the right way, i.e. lovingly, and holding your beliefs lightly. I argue that what I call the "a/theistic orthodoxy" observable within the emerging church milieu is a practical expression of Caputo's project, particularly as it relates to the concept of truth. Hence my title: A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist... i.e., an a/theist.

Update: The States

So March, April and May are pretty busy times in my department as all the research students madly rush to complete pieces to hand in at the end of April for the Panel Reviews that are held at the end of May. The Easter holidays usually pass in a panicked blur of reading and writing and editing. At least they usually do for me. It's the time of year when I realise I haven't done as much work as I should have done, and desperately try to rectify that situation. That was a long winded way of apologising for the scarcity of recent posts!

I recently got back from Boston. I stocked up on American goodness (Reese's peanut butter cups and Hershey's peanut butter kisses); I ate eggs over easy, a bagel with lite cream cheese, and a Boston kreme donut from Dunkin Donuts; I bought a large coke from Wendy's which lasted me two days; I found out what a Tootsie Roll is; and I got maple syrup candies for a UK-bound US mate. I went on a Duck Tour of Boston (my World War Two amphibious landing vehicle was either Beacon Hilda or Back Bay Bertha - can't remember exactly), taking in the Christian Science Headquarters, Boston Public Library, Copely Square, Trinity Church, Boston Public Gardens, the Make Way for Ducklings statue, Boston Common, Cheers, Beacon Hill, the State House, the Charles River, Bunker Hill, the USS Constitution, Old North Church, and the Holocaust Memorial. I went up to the SkyWalk observatory at the Prudential centre for a 360 of the city; shopped at Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market, Macy's and Filene's Basement; and watched the Boston Bruins kick Montreal Canadien butt 2-1 in overtime Sunday night (only on tv, but it was still very exciting!).

I also did some work. I went to Boston for a conference at Gordon College in Wenham, MA, a Christian liberal arts college that was hosting the "Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism" conference of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology. I meant to post the programme before I went but things got a little on top of me! I'm going to blog about the conference in general on Jason Clark's site some time in the near future, but here's the programme to whet your appetite. I'll blog more in relation to my paper ("A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist: Truth, A/theistic Orthodoxy, and the Emerging Church Milieu") soon too.

Friday, April 11

Roger Haight, Union Theological Seminary: "The Impact of Pluralism on Ecclesiology."

Ed Mooney, Syracuse University: "Tactile Truth: A View from the Trenches."

Katharine Sarah Moody, Lancaster University: "A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist."

Saturday, April 12

Thomas Clarke, Stonehill College: "Truth and Castration."

Marion Larson and Sarah Shady, Bethel University: "Interfaith Dialogue in a Pluralistic World: Insights from Martin Buber and Miroslav Volf."

Wilson Dickinson, Syracuse University: "The Other of the Heading: The Deconstruction of Religion and Doing the Truth."

Lovisa Bergdahl, Stockholm University: "'Lost in Translation': On the Untranslatable and its Ethical Implications for Religious Pluralism."

Neal DeRoo, Boston College: "Toward a Testimonial Understanding of Reason and Religion in the Public Sphere."

Richard Kearney, Boston College: "Anatheism: Welcoming Strange Gods."

Christianity, Gender Roles, and Wife Swapping

My post for Jason Clark's blog is now up, "Christianity, Gender Roles, and Wife Swapping."

It reflects upon a recent episode of Channel Four's "Wife Swap," connecting my interests in contemporary culture and the social construction of gender and gender roles. It also draws upon my research among lesbian Christians which explores the construction of selfhood in a religion which encourages selflessness.

The Values of Metal?

I recently helped out a former Religious Studies student of mine by filling out a questionnaire about the values of metal music and I thought I’d post some thoughts about it here. Christian Goths have long been among my interests for future research, so it was a really interesting questionnaire for me.

For a bit of background, here’s some of the bands I listen to: Nine Inch Nails are my favourite, closely followed by Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Tool and Korn. There’s also My Ruin, Disturbed, Apocalyptica, Within Temptation, Nightwish, and Lacuna Coil – the last four of which could be called rock opera or orchestral metal rather than industrial rock like MM. I also like Switchblade Symphony who are (a now-split) goth/electro pop group (NIN are also pretty poppy). Then there’s stuff like Lycia, Faith and the Muse, This Ascension, and Love Spirals Downwards, which are more like ethereal goth, and the Cocteau Twins, of course. The Mission and Siouxsie and the Banshees can’t be left out, and neither can a few others that harbour a love of eighties goth electro/pop, like London After Midnight and The Cruxshadows.

Anyway, here are my thoughts, distilled through the process of justifying my musical tastes to my partner – he is now at the point where he can have a great time at Marilyn Manson, NIN and Korn concerts! – and as articulated in a questionnaire about the values of metal.

In a nutshell, I think that the values of the music I listen to revolve around three things:

• politics,
• religion,
• and sex.
  
  

Politically, RATM [Rage Against the Machine] are one of the most obvious band to mention in this respect. But I think that artists like Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor [NIN] and Jonathon Davies [Korn] are particularly adept at tuning into a level of discontent with current social trends (capitalism and consumerism, for example) and current events (for example, the war in Iraq) and expressing this discontent creatively through music and lyrics.

When Marilyn Manson sings about fascism, he isn’t espousing that as an appropriate model for society; rather, he is trying to point to the fact that capitalism, liberal democracy, etc, is no more an appropriate model for society than fascism – it’s doing just as much damage to people as fascism does. These artists deconstruct the accepted meta-narratives of society, through which the status quo is justified and maintained, thereby trying to destabilise it through, among other things, word play, parody and anger.

A good example is the reaction I see in music to the position the UK and US took on the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. It’s clear in Nine Inch Nails’ last album Year Zero, and even Muse are singing about it in their track Take a Bow! I don’t think that anyone can miss the anti-war sentiments in a lot of music today.

In terms of religion, the music I listen to does two things. Firstly, it critiques “traditional,” institutionalized, authoritarian, exclusivistic, patriarchal, homophobic Religion. This is most clearly seen in the kind of deconstructive lyrics I mentioned above, particularly in the music of NIN and MM, but another good example is Jonny Cash’s Personal Jesus which parodies televangelism and other aspects of American evangelical culture.

But, secondly, music enables spiritual experience and therefore constructs a much more positive (though definitely not institutional) religiosity that is probably more accurately called a spirituality. So, rather than having to contain any overt spiritual message in and of itself, metal is also a vehicle for me to have spiritual experiences.

And then, of course, there’s sex. Often, the lyrics themselves espouse particular approaches to sexuality – liberal, subversive, and explicit – for example, Nine Inch Nail’s Closer. However, other tracks are either less explicit in their lyrics or the music itself is sexual, with particular rhythms and bluesy chords which evoke the sexuality of metal’s musical roots. Also metal is often very poetic and mythological. Love and tragedy are a very common theme among lyricists – Marilyn Manson’s last album Eat Me, Drink Me is a good example of this!!!

In relation to these three things I think that metal deconstructs the normative value systems which uphold the status quo. Metal attempts to expose the power plays in contemporary society which privilege some of its elements whilst oppressing others. So its values are that of equalising power imbalances through espousing the values of marginalised groups.

I share many of these values, especially anti-war sentiments, socialist and anarchic political leanings, spiritual movements away from institutionalised religion towards what could be called an a/theism, and fluid sexual identity.

Some of my favourite lyrics, some rock, some not (‘xcuse the French):

“Well did you hear, there’s a natural order? Those most deserving will end up with the most? That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top? Well I say, sh*t floats. Bluntly put, in the fewest of words, c*nts are still running the world,” Jarvis Cocker, Running the World.

“This is Evolution, the monkey, the man, then the gun,” Marilyn Manson, Cruci-Fiction in Space.

“I pushed a button and elected him to office, he pushed a button and dropped a bomb, you pushed a button and can watch it on the television, those m*th*rf*ck*rs didn’t last too long,” Nine Inch Nails, Capital G.

“I never really hated the one true God, but the god of the people I hated,” Marilyn Manson, Disposable Teens.

“Lift up the receiver, I’ll make you believer, I will deliver, you know I’m a forgiver,” Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus.

“And it give us sight, and you’ll see the light, and it burns so bright, now we know we’re right. When his kingdom comes, and thy will be done, we’ve just begun, we’re the chosen ones. You cannot win, with the colour of your skin, you won’t be getting into the Promised Land. It’s just another case, you people still don’t know your place, step aside, out the way, wipe that look off your face, cause we are the divine separated from the swine, come on, sing along, everybody now, God-given,” Nine Inch Nails, God Given.

“Cast a spell, cast a spell on the country you run. And risk, you will risk, you will risk all their lives and their souls. Death, you bring death, and destruction to all that you touch. Yeah hex, feed the hex, feed the hex on the country you love. What we’ve become, is contrary to what we want. Now burn, you will burn, you will burn in hell, yeah you’ll burn in hell for your sins,” Muse, Take a Bow.

“Return to me, return to me, return to me, turn to me, leave me no one. Return to me, return to me, return to me, turn to me, case aside. Return to me, return to me, return to me, turn to me, leave me no one. Turn to me, return to me, return to me, you’ve made me turn away,” Disturbed, Prayer.

“I cross the oceans, I cross the seas, I cross the mountains, like a new disease. Take a look at the Earth from a plane, you’ll see the Earth cut up and in pain. I’m the scum of the Earth, I am a cancer, I am humanity,” Filter, Cancer.

“Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses,” RATM, Killing in the Name of.

“San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell. May your walls fall and may I live to tell. May all the world forget you ever stood. And may all the world regret you did no good,” Johnny Cash, San Quentin.