Continuing with my round-up of the
ISRLC conference "
Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice," which I started
here, I'm up to Saturday afternoon's Modern Theology panel, at which I presented my paper, "
How to 'Eat' Well in Church: Saying 'Yes' to the Other and Becoming Nothing in Derrida, Paul and Emerging Christian Discourse." As I said
here, I was hoping that all the papers in this session would overlap with my interest in
the "ecclesial" performance of contemporary theo-philosophies, with Mark Godin's paper exploring liturgy and
Michele le Doeuff and Ben Kautzer's connecting
Louis-Marie Chauvet and
Maurice Blondel to sacramentality and charity. Here are the abstracts (they're long):
Mark Godin, "
Situated Liturgies: A Theology of Worship meets the Philosophy of Michele le Doeuff."
"Liturgical theology seeks to negotiate meaning and understanding via attentiveness to specific practices of devotion, where liturgy is the worship discourse of a faith community. This discourse both reveals and furthers
relationships between participants and others (including God). The problem for liturgical theologians is that devotional practices are extremely diffuse, composed of a vast web of contents and contexts, knitted together around a notion of serving God. Because liturgies are concrete sets of words and actions tied to particular communities, many narratives and purposes inform worship, just as there are many faith communities. To address this plurality, Christian
liturgical theologians often attempt to identify core principles which define Christian liturgy and are universally true for all who adhere to the faith. Unfortunately, such endeavours tend to
obscure real differences, erase otherness, and ignore actual embodied practice in favour of an ideal. Some other strategy is needed to take account of diversity.
"In her book
Hipparchia's Choice, Michele Le Doeuff ascribes to philosophy projects of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Presenting this locative concern in terms of where you are and where you want to go, Le Doeuff notes that
philosophy cannot really be disinterested; in practice, the discipline is always situated, meaning that philosophers ask questions from, and marked by, particular places and their own relationship with others. A corollary of this situatedness is that
knowledge is also incomplete. Le Doeuff argues for a philosophical practice which accepts this incompleteness by acknowledging the presence of oers who might have different opinions; she points towards a philosophy which is
a collaborative effort, with a multiplicity of sources, influences, and practitioners asking similar questions from different vantage points. Indeed, Le Doeuff realises that a philosophical rigour that discounts speculation, whispers and mystery is not really rigorous at all. She maintains that it is better to venture a partially-formed word, learning what it means as you go, than to remain silent.
"In this paper, I will argue that liturgical theology could learn much from Le Doeuff's construal of philosophy.
Instead of minimising the concretely local nature of liturgical practice by presenting it as a manifestation of some deeper, more universal meaning, liturgical theology could seek meaning precisely at the point of particularity, investigating the relationships illuminated and engendered along the trajectories of worship.
"The heart of this approach derives from the correspondence between
the liturgical need for community and Le Doeuff's notion of
collaborative philosophy. Just as this philosophy relies on attending to and making room for others, a liturgical theology relies on a complex constellation of relationships within which one values the presence and participation of others. Similarly, Le Doeuff's acceptance of the incompleteness of the philosophical endeavour can carry over to liturgical theology, generating a notion of
the worshipping community as an open and creative collaboration, with possibilities for forging ties with those outside of its bounds. In return, liturgical theology can offer to philosophy an example of language and practice which speaks something vital from and within the unruliness of embodiment."
Ben Kautzer, "
When Faith Gets a Body: Sacramentality and the Order of Charity."
"At the heart of prophetic witness in Scripture is
a deep concern for the poor and the oppressed, the lowly dwellers huddled at the margins of our collective perception (i.e. Am. 5.21-27; Hos. 6.6; Isa. 1.10-17; Jer. 7.1-28; Mic. 6.6-8). This concern carries with it an unsettling critique of those who would audibly declare God’s praises and yet deny with their hands the plight of the needy. This resounding cry for justice does not point to some abstract or juridical moral edifice, but rather
calls forth the people of God to an embodied life of charity and faithful worship of the One who is both "a refuge for the poor" (Isa. 25.4) and radically identified in Christ Jesus with "the very least of these" (Matt. 25.31-46).
"Such prophetic discourse fundamentally concerns
the intersection of liturgy and ethics. Within this context, the ancient and complex practices traditionally named “works of mercy” (i.e. gifts of food and drink, prayer and compassion, shelter and hospitality) confound neat and divisible categorization. Irreducibly personal yet intrinsically communal, such deeds of loving-kindness represent the evental fusion of word and deed, an intensification of liturgical devotion, extending its purview into the mundane spaces of the everyday. These practices demands that like Israel,
the church must "live its liturgy".
"Unfortunately, the church’s ministry of charity is currently being called into question from all sides as
governments increasingly enjoin faith-based communities and charities to shed their religious particularity, enter the "public sphere," and tackle our more pervasive social problems. These invitations often require adherence to a wide array of ideological presuppositions regarding the nature of religion, the definition of charity, and the proper ends such actions are ultimately meant to serve. These subjugating cross-pressures impact the church's own self-understanding. For it seems that mundane acts like visiting the sick or offering hospitality to strangers are
rarely perceived as constitutive of the church's liturgical—let alone political—life. Couched within the language of volunteerism, such expressions of benevolence tend to be seen as "valuable" yet clearly subsidiary.
"I contend that faithfully navigating these challenges involves
recovering a theopolitical vision of Christian charity beyond the languid horizon of individualistic philanthropy or social welfarism. Specifically, this paper will seek to explore – through a critical engagement with Louis-Marie Chauvet’s sacramental theology of Christian identity, Maurice Blondel’s philosophical theory of action, and Thomas Aquinas’ virtue ethics – how the
works of mercy constitute a liturgically-shaped politics of the everyday—a religious social ethic capable of resisting the bureaucratic institutionalization (and elimination) of human compassion. As Pope Benedict XVI has recently observed,
works of charity constitute not merely what the church does, but what the church is; not its relevant usefulness, but its vulnerable faithfulness. Perhaps heeding afresh the prophetic imagination will help us struggle on in our vocation as a church – offered to God as a sacrifice of mercy – broken, consecrated, and distributed for the life of the world."
Since I've already posted the abstract for my contribution to this panel (
here - although there ended up being much more Zizek in the final paper than I had envisioned when I wrote the abstract), I thought I'd just post
some introductory sections today.
"Introduction: Truth as an Event"
An examination of
the notion of "truth" within the discourse (published materials, online media, and interview transcripts) of the emerging church milieu - which can be characterised as a conversation that is interested, among other things, in the implications of philosophical theology for contemporary Christianity - reveals
the influence of several "thinkers of the event." For
Derrida, there is 'something demanding' about thinking about
truth as an event that 'fall[s] on me, or visit[s] me,' that is done
to me and
makes me ("
Composing Circumfession," p.23). As for
Badiou, then, truth as an event is constitutive of the subject, since a 'wager,' a 'groundless decision' that an event even occured, constitutes the one who makes the decision as
the truth-subject, after which a 'chance-driven course' is attempted,
a truth-prodcedure, that is the working out of the consequences of 'fidelity' to the event (
Infinite Thought, pp.46-47). Fidelity to the (Christ) event constitutes a community of truth-subjects,
the truth-community - a community of believers which
Zizek uses the language of
the Holy Spirit to designate (
The Fragile Absolute, p.127). Any
theology of the event, such as
Caputo's deconstructive a/theology (
The Weakness of God) must, then, be translated into a
community of the event.
In this paper, I interpret elements of emerging Christian discourse as an atempt to imagine and perform spiritual practices that form community in fidelity to this notion of truth as an event. I first introduce the philosophical engagements with Saint Paul that frame the discussion, before raising the question of
how this Pauline theo-philosophy of the event might be enacted by religious collectives. I then present emerging Christian spiritual practice in the writings of
Pete Rollins, founder of ikon, Belfast, through the framework of
saying "yes" to the other and becoming nothing. I end by probing whether these practices might constitute a
radical religious sociality of the event.
Saint Paul and the Philosophers
In 1997, Badiou published
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (
English translation 2003). From Zizek, came, in 2000,
The Fragile Absolute and, three years later,
The Puppet and The Dwarf. In 2005, Caputo co-convened "St. Paul among the Philosophers," at which both Badiou and Zizek were keynote speakers (
published in 2009). And in 2006,
Theodore Jennings published
Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice. These philosophical engagements with Saint Paul seek to demonstrate his import for the critique of ideology, society and culture, for questions of justice, and for critical theory more generally. But
can this work on Paul not also be used to change the Church? My exploration of this possibility begins with Derrida on
hospitality and "
eating well"...
Dot, dot, dot...
This piece acts as a kind of bridge, since it comes
post-PhD thesis and pre-postdoctoral research and uses previous research to start to formulate new questions, questions which build on the more theo-philosophical emphasis of my doctoral thesis to move in
a more socio-political direction. It builds on the discursive approach I took in my thesis to incorporate more ethnographic approaches that will seek to determine
the extent to which the radical sociality that I see as implicit in emerging Christian discourse is successfully enacted by concrete collectives. We'll have to wait and see if I manage to secure some research funding to carry out this work!
Several conference delegates during the Q&A after my paper asked about the social realities of this discourse on hospitality. One person noted that
the language of hospitality is often used by men, whereas the work of hospitality is often done by women. Another delegate (Natalie Wigg, whom I mentioned in an early
post on the conference and has been to ikon events in Belfast) noted that
ikon can often be incredibly inhospitable. This concern has also been raised by a commenter on this blog, in reaction to my abstract for this conference, who noted what he called a "gulf" between "idealistic theory" and "the more prosaic on the ground reality." This concern about
the relationship between theory and practice, however, is precisely what I hope to explore further. I just need the money!
