PCR4 - The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion

In April next year, Syracuse University will be hosting the fourth Postmodernism, Culture and Religion conference, convened by Jack Caputo. The conference will explore the theme of "The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion," a topic which I'm sure will, by examining the possibilities of new intellectual directions in continental philosophy of religion, impact both directly and indirectly upon current debates about the social value of philosophy and other humanities disciplines (as well as the social sciences and arts) in the face of growing pressure to demonstrate the immediate economic value of higher education (basically restricted to the sciences and business studies). See in particular the high-profile short-sighted closure of the philosophy department at Middlesex University (including the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy) here, here and (partially saved by Kingston University) here and here.

Anyway, here's some information and blurb from for PCR4, which will run from April 7 - 9 2011.

Plenary speakers will include Jack Caputo, Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities (Syracuse University), Philip Goodchild, Professor of Theology and Religous Studies (University of Nottingham), and Catherine Malabou, Professor of Philosophy (Universite Paris Quest Nanterre La Defense).

The call for papers blurb is as follows:

"Paper submissions are invited on the topic "The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion," its past and present, its history and its prospects, in the widest possible terms, addressing the whole range of its implications—politics, feminism, constructive theology, philosophy, history, literature, interfaith dialogue, and the hermeneutics of sacred texts.

"In the past, these conferences, which have provided a forum for the most influential philosophers, theologians, and cultural theorists to interact, have consisted solely of several keynote speakers. This conference will be different. It will feature three plenary speakers and offer multiple concurrent sessions devoted to papers submitted on a diversity of issues relating to the primary theme. This call for papers is deliberately open, befitting the conference's animating concern with the future."

The call for papers then lists some very interesting questions which papers could address:

• What now, or what comes next—specifically, after the death, if not of God, at least of the generation consisting of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, etc.? This question concerns not only the future after those significant theorists, but also the future after-life of these eminent minds who have left such a deep impact on continental philosophy of religion.
• What is the future of Kant and German Idealism, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in continental philosophy of religion?
• What remains for the future of phenomenology?
• Of the "theological turn" in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and others?
• Of Gadamer, Ricoeur and philosophical hermeneutics?
• Of apophatic or mystical theology?
• What is the future of feminism and continental philosophy of religion?
• What are the status and future of the new trinity of Agamben, Badiou and Zizek?
• What relevance do the political interpretations of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and the more recent continental philosophers such as François Laruelle and Catherine Malabou have to philosophy of religion and political theology?
• What about the future of sovereignty, of money and capitalism, as in the work of Philip Goodchild?
• What is the future of the movements of Radical Orthodoxy and of radical death of God theology, whether in their original or contemporary manifestations?
• What about the new sciences of information and complexity in thinkers like Mark C. Taylor and Michel Serres?
• What about Continental philosophy of religion and our “companion species” in Donna Haraway?
• What about “Post-Humanism”?
• What is the future of continental Philosophy of religion and Judaism?
• And Islam?
• Or world religions generally?
• What is the relationship between postmodernism, religion and postcolonialism?
• What role can continental philosophy play in the future of religion?
• In the professional study of religion?
• How does continental philosophical theology relate to the ethnological and empirical-scientific study of religion?
• How does continental philosophy of religion differ from traditional philosophy of religion?
• Or from analytic philosophy of religion?
• What is continental philosophy of religion anyway?
  

Hmmm.... cogs turning... ideas developing...

...wonder if I'll have a job by April 2011 in order to afford to go???

The call for papers asks for electronic copies of completed papers (previously unpublished and up to 3,000 words) to be subject to a double blind review by a selection committee, so include your name, paper title and contact information on a separate page. and put the paper title (but not name) on header or footer of each numbered page of the paper itself. These submissions are due by December 15, 2010 and should be sent to pcrconf@syr.edu. Acceptances will be made by February 15, 2011.

This information is also available on a (very hard on the eyes) website here.

What I'm Reading

One of the key figures in my doctoral thesis is James K.A. Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. As well as blog Fors Clavigera (see here for an explanation of its title), he writes a What I'm Reading blog, which is actually the older of the two. Jamie describes What I'm Reading as "something between an annotated bibliography and a collection of book reviews." This is something that I'm going to try out with this blog.

Having completed my PhD, I now spend my days hunting for academic jobs, writing conference papers, and turning my thesis into a book and a couple of articles, and I'll still post about these things. However, I'm also still reading new things. So I thought I might try out posting snippits of what I'm reading which will give insight into where I am hoping to go next with my work.

Since my postdoctoral aspirations converge on exploring the possibility of Derridean radical sociality, I thought starting with this from Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and The Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pp.43-44 -

"When today's Left bombards the capitalist system with demands that it obviously cannot fulfill (Full employment! Retain the welfare state! Full rights for immigrants!), it is basically playing a game of hysterical provocation, of addressing the Master with a demand that will be impossible for him to meet, and will thus expose his impotence.

"The problem with this strategy, however, is not only that the system cannot meet these demands, but that those who voice them do not really want them to be satisfied.

"When, for example, 'radical' academics demand full rights for immigrants and the opening of borders to them, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate the developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent racist working-class backlash that would then endanger the privileged position of these very academics?

"Of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met - in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position."

Attending to the Other bursary

I just heard from the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture that they are going to give me a bursary to help towards the cost (£385) of going to their "Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice" conference at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in September. All I can say is, "thank you" and "phew!"

"I Hate Your Church..." Published

My Expository Times article on the emerging church ("'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu") is now available online. You can access the abstract for free here, but you'll have to subscribe to The Expository Times, purchase short-term access, or log-in using an Athens account or university homepage.

I'm not allowed to distribute the article either.


The article briefly assesses current ways of defining "the emerging church" and suggests the value of the notion of a "milieu." Borrowing from Gordon Lynch's work on progressive spirituality, the concept of a global "emerging church milieu" (with regional milieus within it, e.g. "US emerging church milieu" or "UK emerging church milieu" etc) allows the emerging church to be portrayed as a coherent religious phenomenon without ignoring local differences and divergences.


I then enumerate what I see as the six commitments of emerging church discourse. These are commitments to:

1. "glocal" contextualisation,
2. "ancient-future" traditions,
3. organisational experimentation,
4. exploring postmodern thought,
5. (re)thinking theology, and
6. socially, politically and environmentally just living.

Not having much space in which to present these commitments in this article, I go into much more detail in my doctoral thesis, but these commitments (which obviously overlap with other Christian and non-Christian milieus beyond the emerging church milieu) are variously understood and put into practice multifariously.


Then I identify two spiritualities which emerge from this milieu: Deep Church spirituality and A/Theistic spirituality. These two spiritualities were primarily presented as hermeneutics in my thesis, but they can also be thought of as spiritualities. In my postdoctoral research, I hope to explore them as social imaginaries. Again, I didn't have the room to go into much detail in this article, but I hope to publish a few academic journal articles and a monograph that will bring my library basement destined thesis to the masses!

My Expository Times article then concludes by reflecting upon the missional orientation of these two emerging church spiritualities. Following a question that John Hull asked of fresh expressions of church in Mission-Shaped Church and Mission-Shaped Questions, I wonder whether Deep Church and A/Theistic spiritualities are kingdom-shaped or church-shaped in their missiologies.

Attending to the Other - conference programme

The provisional conference programme for "Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice" is now available from here. My paper, "How to Eat Well in Church: Saying 'Yes' to the Other and Becoming Nothing in Derrida, Paul and Emerging Christian Discourse," is on one of the Theology Panels and will be (provisionally) at 3.30pm on Saturday 25th September 2010.

The conference, which runs from Thursday 23rd until Sunday 26th with Amy Hollywood speaking on the 23rd, Graham Ward and Toril Moi on the 24th, Paul Fiddes on the 25th, and Victor Seidler on the 26th, has several Zizek papers (thanks to the Continental Philosophy of Religion Panel conveners) that I'm looking forward to. And they don't clash with my panel, yay!

• Jeff Keuss "Slavoj Zizek and Dynamic Incarnationalism: Towards a Lived Material Theology of Personhood"
• Thomas Lynch "Zizek and Liberation Theology: A Lacano-Marxist Revival"
• Ian Pattenden "Beyond the Death of God: The Open Eschaton in Bloch and Zizek"

Anyone interested should take a look at Adam Kotsko's Zizek and Theology.

Now, I just need to find nearly £400 to afford to go. Hmmm.... maybe I should sell some books?

An "Emerging Church" Book Review

After completing my article for The Expository Times, "'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu," I was asked to write a book review of Bruce Sanguin's (2008) The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal. My review, entitled "Making an Emergent Future Present," will appear in about six months.

This is not really a book written about or for what I consider to be the "emerging church" - and the reviews from within what I call the "emerging church milieu" agree (here's one by Jonathon Brink on Emergent Village). This is about progressive Christianity (see Gordon Lynch's great overview and analysis of the broader "progressive milieu"), or, as Sanguin's website describes it, "evolutionary Christian spirituality." It is a book about progressive Christianity and modern science, rather than about emerging Christianity and postmodern thought or theology. The science he appropriates in this book (spiral dynamics) will be deeply troubling to many within the emerging church milieu. However, his work is nonetheless theologically and politically interesting.

Abstract accepted for Attending to the Other

My abstract for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture's "Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice" was accepted by the theology panel. The paper is called "How to Eat Well in Church: Saying 'Yes' to the Other and Becoming Nothing in Derrida, Paul, and Emerging Christian Discourse," and will detail the ways in which emerging church literature advocates "attending to the other" and mirrors approaches to "the other" in Paul (particularly in Romans) and in Derrida.

A timely publication from within the UK emerging church milieu which I can't wait to get my hands on is Kester Brewin's Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures.

Another book of interest, which comes out too late for me to include it in my September paper, is Graham Adam's Christ and the Other: In Dialogue with Hick and Newbigin. Here's the blurb: "How should we relate to "others" - those within a particular tradition, those of different traditions, and those who are oppressed? In the light of these anxieties, this book offers a vision of Christ as "the Shaken One," rooted in commuinty with others and building upon the work of Andrew Shanks. Shaped through dialogue with the theologies of John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin, Adams urges Christian communities to attend more deeply to the demands of ecumenical, dialogical and political theologies, to build an ever greater "solidarity of others" - a quality of community better demonstrating Christlike "other-regard."

How to Eat Well in Church

As I begin to emerge from a just-passed-my-viva-(phew!) lull (I always tend to get a bit depressed after the excitement of finishing a piece of work, presenting a piece of work, or handing something in), I am doing my corrections (done!), writing my paper for the Edinburgh BSA SocRel conference on the Changing Face of Christianity (not done yet!), and submitting abstracts for a couple of conferences later in the year - 500 words for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture's "Attending to the Other" (done!) and 200 words for the "Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue" symposium, held by the University of Glasgow's Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts (not yet done!).

My submission for the Attending to the Other conference is called, "How to Eat Well in Church: Saying 'Yes' to the Other and Becoming Nothing in Derrida, Paul and Emerging Christian Discourse." Hopefully it'll get accepted by either the Continental Philosophy of Religion or the Theology panels, but I'm also keen to work this paper into a journal article so it won't be too bad if it doesn't get accepted. Here's the abstract:

‘Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination... before any identification’ (Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77).

‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you’ (St Paul, Romans 15:7).

‘...we can freely enter into a theatrical space in which we act as though there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female... Here we do not lay down our identity only to pick up our new identity in Christ. Rather it is in laying down all our identities that we directly identify with Christ’ (Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, 178-179 and peterrollins.net/blog/?p=889)

‘If a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity; if it keeps its identity, it becomes unwelcoming’ (John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 113)

For Derrida, hospitality, friendship and love are responsibilities that are excessive to the complacent fulfilment of duty. While hospitality by rights and justice under the law protect the self-same, unconditional hospitality is to attend to (to pay attention to and to serve) alterity. Similarly, for (Badiou’s) Paul, the Christian community is to welcome the other, without quarrelling about or arguing over determinations of truth. Co-implicated in this is that, in order to welcome those with different truths, that which makes the host distinctive is to be sacrificed or performatively suspended, which is why there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). Paul’s injunction to hospitality is occasioned by questions regarding whether or not to eat meat and what Paul calls for is the creation of communities that attend not to the question of what to eat but to the question of how to eat, which is a ‘learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat’ (Derrida, “Eating Well,” 282). The event of Jesus’ excess in relation to all law is to be translated into hospitable ecclesial spaces that attempt to let the other be other, to privilege hospitality over the temptation to conversion or consensus, to refuse to subsume the other to the self-same, and to create a space that places unconditional welcome above conditions of entrance.

The “emerging church conversation” is one contemporary discourse about Christianity that is attempting to imagine and enact such spaces. This paper introduces the discursive motifs in which this Derridean-Pauline desire to attend to the other is expressed and through which it is being performed liturgically, particularly in the work of Peter Rollins and the Belfast-based ‘transformance art’ collective, ikon. I examine the ways in which alterity is welcomed, by which a place for the other is prepared, and through which Christian community negotiates unity and difference. I raise questions of openness and the possibility of radical sociality, of kenosis and the problems of self-identity, and of how deconstructive theologies (such as John D. Caputo’s weak theology) might be ecclesiologically, ethically and politically viable for concrete collectives.

If deconstructive theology interprets the church and the world, how might deconstructive religious collectives be changing them?

Viva Results

On Monday, I had my viva voce (oral defense of my thesis). Because I felt that I was most likely to get either a pass with minor corrections (usually typos), for which they give you 3 months or a pass with more major amendments (6-12 months), I went in having written sections on the things that I thought they might ask me to add (a list of typos, some more contextual information for my participants - which I had to cut to get to under my word limit of 100,000 words - and a section for my conclusion that widened things back out to the future of Christianity in the UK). This meant that they gave me a pass with 3 months to correct typos, and add in those things I'd already written, so I'm hoping to be able to get back up to Lancaster at the end of the Edinburgh conference to hand in my final thesis.

While I was nervous about the viva, I also drank lots of rescue remedy and felt much more confident about what I had produced than I did when I handed it in and was suffering from exhaustion! I was able to get a bit more perspective on the thing and just think, "I'm not facing a firing squad; the worst that can happen is that they have some concerns, that I'm then allowed to address and resubmit. What's the big deal?" So I think I had quite a good frame of mind to go in - even when there were hiccups like when I forgot to put a parking ticket in my car, or when my supervisor forgot to tell my independent chair that the time of the viva had changed (we found a tape recorder instead)!

Anyway, it went down like this...

My examiners (external, Gerard Loughlin, and internal, Chris Partridge) have a little bit of time together to tell each other what they think of it and to work out who is going to ask what and in what order, etc. Then they send for me. In our department, it's optional whether or not to have your supervisor present but I thought she might be able to make notes better than I would and I thought it would be useful to have a rundown of what happened - in case I wasn't able to remember anything when I came out!

Chris started off by saying that they liked and enjoyed reading my thesis, which put me at ease somewhat - although they aren't allowed to tell the candidate what their initial recommendations are (since the viva voce can be the point at which they change their minds about whether or not the candidate demonstrates the requisite skills to be awarded a PhD degree). Chris asked me warm up questions about how I came to be involved in researching the emerging church and then Gerard asked me about whether I needed the emerging church voices (my participants) alongside the established academic voices and whether my argument would work without them. This is what my supervisor Deborah F. Sawyer and I had been calling the Gavin Hyman question (since he wrote The Predicament of Postmodern Theology as an analysis of Radical Orthodoxy and textual nihilism without recourse to empirical data), and I answered it by demonstrating how a combination of theory and data could allow me to speak to both: to Radical Orthodoxy and deconstructive theology, and to the emerging church milieu.

Gerard also asked whether the work of Jack Caputo is more nihilist than I was portraying it, which I answered by explaining that, while Caputo does use nihilistic language such as the void and the abyss to describe the flux or play of differance, it is only possible to portray Caputo as a nihilist by ignoring the more affirmative strands within both Derrida's work and Caputo's own deconstructive theology, particularly the messianic "to-come."

Then Chris and Gerard asked me some more questions about the emerging church milieu to contextualise their discourse and activities within Christianity in the UK (and the US) more generally, which was just a nice chat about broader issues in philosophy, theology and ecclesiology. They agreed that I should include a little more on this, and on who my participants were - which I'd already written in anticipation of these comments.

Deborah and I then waited outside for about four minutes and were then asked back in, which was when they said that they were going to recommend the award of PhD subject to minor corrections and additions and Chris said that they thought I'd should publish it.

Although they've given me 3 months to do this work (standard practice), Chris said it was only a few days work. However, as I have to go back up to Lancaster to get it bound and to hand it in, I'll have to wait until we drive past on our way back from the BSA SocRel conference on "The Changing Face of Christianity in the 21st Century." Deborah gave me a bottle of champagne and that was that! So the final thesis will be submitted in a few weeks and then I'll graduate in December and be Dr. Moody (which sounds a little too like an evil genius, but I'm happy with it for now!)

PhD Submitted!

I submitted my thesis yesterday. That fact is still sinking in. It feels like something that happened to me, rather than something I did. So after I've had a bit of time to reflect, I'll post more about it. My viva is already "arranged" (we're waiting for the paperwork to catch up with what we've sorted out) for March 22nd and my examiners will be Gerard Loughlin and Chris Partridge. I'm sure I'll have lots of posts between now and then second-guessing myself, so I'll be able to post more about the content of my thesis in a self-reflexive/self-critical way!

Expository Times article on the Emerging Church

Way back during the last few months of 2009, I was asked to write a piece for The Expository Times on religion and the Internet for a volume they are producing on the future of Christianity. I was pleased about being asked but felt a little bit that it would be revisiting tangential interests rather than moving me forward, so when the person they had lined up to write a piece on the emerging church was unable to, I was really pleased to write that instead! It will feature in vol.121, no.10 (July) and is entitled, " 'I Hate Your Church, What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu." It's basically an overview of what I describe as the emerging church "milieu" and the two spiritualities (they are characterised as two hermeneutics in my thesis) that I see arising from such a milieu. The basic argument of the piece (relating to where the missional focus of the emerging church should be located - church or kingdom) should, however, ignite a few sparks.

Re-Writing the Bible Symposium

On June 14-15th 2010, the University of Glasgow's Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts will be hosting a symposium on "Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue." Keynote panellists include Michael Schmidt, Michael Symmons-Roberts, Kei Miller, Sara Maitland and Michele Wandor. Here's some blurb:


“…there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”- Terry Eagleton

A recent exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art consisted of a bible, laid open alongside a supply of pens, with the invitation, “If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please feel free to find a way to write yourself back in.” The comments scribbled in the margins—and the very notion of ‘writing in the Bible’—became the subject of a widespread controversy, resulting in the gallery’s decision to place this bible inside a perspex cube, effectively sealing it off and protecting it from what might be deemed ‘undesirable’ commentary. Visitors were still invited to write comments, but now they were written on sheets of paper that were then selected by gallery staff and inserted between the bible’s pages.

In light of this very present debate, Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue invites poets, writers, and scholars to engage with interdisciplinary questions surrounding the phenomena of retellings or revisions of Bible in creative writing. These retellings have a heritage that, arguably, starts within the books of the Bible itself and stretches across many literatures and traditions; poets and writers in every age filter biblical themes and images through thefocus of their own period and practice. Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Yeats, Owen, H.D, Plath, Kinsella, Hill; the list is long, diverse, and continues to grow.

This symposium asks why contemporary writers have chosen to rework this particular source text, and what stances they have taken towards it: faithful, using creative writing as a means of prayerful reflection or theological exegesis? Or furious, a railing against the Bible’s injustices and absences? Or a mixture of both, a sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful kind of dialogue? If every reading is also a re-writing, then it follows that every re-writing is also a reading, and for this reason many biblical scholars are fascinated by the literary ‘afterlives’ of the scriptures, the ways in which the Bible is sustained by creative imaginations in cultural settings and times very distant from its own writing and compilation.

We are seeking 20-minute papers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including but not limited to: literature, theology, biblical studies, critical and cultural theory, history, politics, and so on. We will consider papers on all forms of ‘creative writing’: poetry, novel, short story, sermon, liturgy, prayers, songs, political writing, theatre, and so on. Our emphasis is on twentieth and twenty-first century works, but we will also consider abstracts on rewritings from other periods. We would be particularly interested in papers looking at spaces that often go unexplored by research in retelling and revisioning, such as biblical romance novels, evangelical speculative fiction, biblical archetypes in autobiography, contemporary liturgy, or popular music. There is the possibility that proceedings will be published.

Please send abstracts (approx. 200 words) to rewritingbible2010@gmail.com, by no later than 19th April 2010.

My fellow doctoral candidate at Lancaster, Dawn Llewellyn, whose thesis explores women's (religious) uses of (religious) text, and I have been searching for a while for a topic of possible collaboration and this could be it! I'm very keen to write something on the ways in which creative writing (particularly the [re-]writing of biblical parables) functions within the emerging church milieu. So I'll have the data and Dawn'll have the theory and we shall make a lovely baby together!!! Although, I haven't actually run any of this by her yet!

Theology and the Arts Conference

I spied this conference a while ago but it took ages for more details to be forthcoming. In April (12-14th) the Society for the Study of Theology's annual conference will be hosted at Manchester University on the theme of "Theology and the Arts." The conference calls for short papers on the conference theme and seminar sessions on other topics (both 20 mins, 20 mins Q&A). The only details I can find online is this small amount of blurb:

"What is the relationship between different art forms and other modes of theological interpretation? Is art true, or subjecive, or both? What are the limitations of artistic representation? How may art be employed in teaching, whether in church or academy? What are the places of art in prayer and liturgy?"

Abstracts of about 200 words should be emailed to Oliver Crisp, who I met in Ireland last Nov, by Feb 18. There is a bursary fund, which you should also apply to via Oliver.

The cost of registration is £90, and then there are several accommodation and meal options to choose from when you log-on to the site here. Full residential is £170, with one night B&B £30. Early registration ends March 4 and the registration deadline is March 23.

I'm thinking that if I submit an abstract it will be on the "a/theology of the event" and the notion of "transformance art" in the UK emerging church milieu.

Young Theologians publication

Just a quick post to say that some of the proceedings from the "Interface: Being a Young Theologian in the World" conference (see my blog posts here, here, here, here, and here) are going to be published. We've been asked to submit our papers for consideration, so fingers crossed for another book chapter. It was a great conference and from my perspective many of the papers linked really neatly, particularly in relation to asking important questions about who we are and where we're going as young theologians. My paper was about not knowing who we are and whether we are theologians, so everything sparked off a lot of interesting thoughts. So we'll see what happens with that.

Departmental Merger

As with most things in most places of work, we had rather a lot more rumours than hard facts about the departmental merger being "suggested" by university management. I find Lancaster to be a very interdisciplinary university anyway, but I think there was a little friction that this merger wasn't allowed to evolve organically but was a rather top-down affair. Some people see this as a good move, others are pissed off. Hopefully, a really good "super department" will come out of all of this. So, the first Religious Studies department (as opposed to Theology departments which focused on the Christian tradition) in the UK, founded by Ninian Smart, pioneer of the discipline since the 1960s, is merging with the departments of Philosophy, and Politics and International Relations to form the Department of Philosophy, Politics and Religion or PPR.

Following a meeting with the students on Jan 14 (which I couldn't get to), a recent email states that this merger is the most viable way to:

• "maintain the best student experience";
• protect the existing disciplines of philosophy, politics and international relations, and religious studies;
• take advantage of interdisciplinary crossovers and opportunities both for new courses and for research staff; and
• create a department that "can prosper in the coming period of UK-wide financial constraints."

The email tells us that the staff who will fulfil the main departmental roles are as follows:

• Head of Department: Robert Geyer (P&IR)
• Research Director and Deputy Head: Chris Partridge (RS)
• Undergraduate Director: Graham Smith (P&IR)
• Postgraduate Director: Andrew Dawson (RS)
• Human Resources Director: Mairi Levitt (Phil)
• External Relations Director: Neil Manson (Phil)

Support staff haven't yet been finalised, and I'm concerned for both our departmental support staff (Wendy Francis, Departmental Officer, who has been with the department since 1983!, and Gillian Taylor, Departmental Assistant, who has been there for nearly 12 years now). I've no idea what is going to happen concerning all three departments' support staff and I'm too scared of asking either Wendy or Gillian in case it upsets them. It must be so hard at the moment. Decisions about support staff are going to be sorted out in February.

In relation to the identities of the existing departments, the email states that "Although the former departments will be housed in one over-arching unit, the identities of the disciplines will be maintained. All three departments have clear strengths and the merger is a move to reinforce and preserve these. These approaches and traditions will be further strengthened by the prestige that a larger unit can bring. In addition, research councils are increasingly looking for proposals which cross disciplines; and employers are increasingly looking for employees who have a broader and more comprehensive grasp on the world around us. All departments evolve over time - and this can be viewed as a part of the evolution of the three departments in response to the new challenges of the 21st century."

This means in practice that single discipline degrees will be maintained (the RS and Phil departments already recently introduced a cross-discipline degree, "Ethics, Philosophy and Religion," but I know that the balance of responsibility for that programme was an issue). Also, all three departments are moving (by the end of 2010, if not before) to a common location. As RS only moved relatively recently, I imagine another move will cause some (minor?) annoyances.

But, hopefully, there will be more advantages than disadvantages. There are a number of possible new crossover modules or degree programmes that would benefit new students, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels (e.g. Religion and Conflict MA). I'm sure this will also increase the vibrancy of the research community as well, for both staff and PhD students. It is the kind of department that would be really great for my postdoc ideas (I'm currently looking at Manchester's Centre for Religion and Political Culture). So, all in all, I think this is good. But I'm worried about Wendy and Gillian.

Research Methods Residential

In September, the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College (where I did a workshop on studying religion and the internet last year, see here and here), and the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme (where I failed to get a job, see here) are running a residential training event for UK PhD students involved in the empirical study of contemporary religion. The residential will run from 6-10 September at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and students who are accepted onto it will have their residential and travel costs paid (nice!). Places are strictly limited and application forms can be downloaded from here and must be received before Feb 19.

Sessions will include:

• theorising religion and the role of the researcher of religion
• choosing/combining research methods
• the research agenda for religion and contemporary society
• sampling
• using quantitative data-sets
• rigour and validity
• ethical and political contexts of researching religion
• ethnography
• visual methods
• researching religion and media, and
• studying spaces and objects

Confirmed speakers include:

• Linda Woodhead,
• Kim Knott,
• David Voas,
• Sophie Gilliat-Ray, and
• Peter Collins (I think this is him, unless he's an expert in gambling or neuroscience!)

Here's some blurb: "Funded by the AHRC’s Collaborative Research Training scheme, the aim of this event is to provide PhD students in this field with advanced methods training in the study of religion not normally available at any single university and represents a major investment in training a significant cohort of PhD students currently working in this field. The event is open to students working across a wide range of disciplines including theology and religious studies, sociology, anthropology, C20th religious history, social policy and geography."

I'm not sure whether I'll be allowed to go on this, as I will have already submitted by thesis, but I'm going to check with Gordon Lynch.

The Thesis in Parables

I'm toying with the idea of including an explicit supplement in my thesis which would be a sort of other to the thesis. For Derrida, argumentation always involves implicit supplementation: in order to argue X, that which is other-than-X is required in an 'infinite chain' that is yet concealed in order to give the 'mirage' that the argument is self-sufficient (OG 157). The supplement both adds to and substitutes the argument: it 'adds only to replace' (OG 145). It is both essential and threatening. Threatening since it reveals that, without it, the argument cannot appear self-sufficient, cannot appear as "a work itself;" without the supplement, there is no "itself" of the work. Therefore essential since the "work itself" is less than whole, less than pure, lacking in and of itself, and in need of supplementation.

This is why I've been thinking about the possibility of including a (there is an infinite chain of supplements such that there is never just one supplement, never just the supplement) supplement that might work as an other of the thesis. While there will be implicit supplements in my thesis (some I may be aware of, others I definitely won't be), I've been thinking/worrying/obsessing about the nature of the doctoral thesis in general, about writing and representation in general before (see here, for example, where I was thinking about alternative presentations, like the work of a number of poststructuralist thinkers, including Derrida's Glas and Circumfession) and think that a supplement that augments the philosophical, theological, ethical and ecclesiological argumentation with literature might be an apt way to explore how argumentation can also be replaced by the supplement.

So I'm thinking about a supplement of creative writing, in which I attempt to write the thesis as parables, "the thesis in parables," one for each chapter, positioned after the thesis, as a supplement. These pieces of writing might say in poetic form what the logic of the argument is trying to say. The parables can (will?) say more than the argument will (can?) and can (will?) replace the argument.

I'm going to post a few of them to the Facebook discussion board of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion at the beginning of March, along with a brief introduction to the background to their creation. I'll also post them in a "thesis in parables" series here at some point.

Re-emergence conference

From March 16-18 2010, the Irish School of Ecumenics, Belfast, will host "Re-emergence: Christianity and the Event of God." This is something that Pete Rollins has been involved in organising and will (very sadly) be the only UK date for his Insurrection tour.

The keynotes include Phyllis Tickle (The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why), which I blogged about here, and Dave Tomlinson (The Post-Evangelical, Re-enchanting Christianity), vicar at my partner's Sim's brother's church, St. Luke's. Those involved in the Insurrection tour with Pete are Padraig O Tauma (Hymns to Swear By, not yet released, but also on Dubh) and Jonny McEwen (Fractured, broken, and Beautiful). Other participants includ Beki Bateson (executive director of London International Festival of Theatre, chair of Amos Trust, and co-founder of Vaux), Ian Mitchell, Kerry Anthony (Depaul Ireland), Kester Brewin (Vaux, Apple, The Complex Christ, Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures), and Alistair Duncan (the garden, the Whitehawk Inn). There'll also be music from a "mystery musician, who we have to keep under wraps for now." Duke Special or Bono?!?

Here's some more info:

"Each new epoch in the life of the Church is born from the white-hot fires of a fundamental question, a question with the power to scorch the very ground that has previously sustained us.

"When they arise, these fundamental questions invite us to rethink what it means to be part of the body of Christ. They have nothing to do with the myriad of disagreements that exist within the shared theological horizon, but rather challenge the very horizon itself. They do not revolve around differences within and between established Christian groups but rather place into question what these groups all take for granted. They cut across what is assumed, short-circuit what is hallowed and, in doing so, appear to threaten the very essence of Christianity itself.

"Is it possible that we stand once more at the threshold of such a question; a question that holds the power to spark a rupturing and re-imagining of the present configuration of Christianity? Are there signs that some of the assumptions we have taken for granted concerning faith need to be interrogated once again?

"We hope that you can join us as we wrestle with these difficult ideas together."

Sadly, the timing of this event isn't great for me. I'm hoping to submit my thesis before the end of February and I need to have my viva before April 1 for some other reasons, so right about mid March I think I'll be biting my nails. I also can't justify the expense of getting over there what with the two of us living on my partner's teaching salary. Ho hum. I'll have to wait for an industrious American to make a dvd of the Insurrection tour... please?!?!?

Attending to the Other

The Faculty of Theology at Oxford University are hosting the 2010 biennial International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture from 23rd - 26th September, at St. Catherine's College (where I went in 2007), on the topic of "Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice."

The full registration fee is a hefty £385 (+ compulsory ISRLC membership, £10)! But the keynote speakers are Amy Hollywood (Harvard University) - check out her Sensible Ecstacy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, which I used in my medieval lesbian studies period - Toril Moi (Duke University) - Sexual/Textual Politics - Paul Fiddes (University of Oxford), and Graham Ward (University of Manchester), which explains it! The good news is that there are bursaries to contribute towards these costs for postgrad students and (what I may well be by then, as I'm for sure not going to still be doing my thesis) unemployed academics!!! Who knows, I may even be an employed academic and not need the help!!! Yeah, right.

Anyway, there are several panels being convened for this conference, including one by the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. The conference organisers invite short papers for these panels (20 mins paper, 10 mins Q&A), and ask for proposals (title and 500 word abstracts) to be sent to the convenor of the panel for which it seems most appropriate. The deadline is March 30 2010. The call for papers includes the information about panels, as well as details of who to submit proposals to. There are quite a few panels, so I'm only going to post details about the ones I'm most interested in. For details about the others download a Word doc from here.

Modern Theology (panel leader: Trevor Hart; abstracts to tah@st-andrews.ac.uk). "Reponsible handling of Christianity's doctrinal commitments today demands that they be revisited in the light of critical theory and its particular insights and claims, an engagement in which we might reasonably anticipate insights and questions flowing in both directions. This panel will concentrate on such encounters, welcoming papers that will seek to relate concrete doctrinal loci constructively to the central concerns and claims of critical theory. Topics might fall within areas such as the following:

• Christology (e.g. history, particularity, universality; the body, crucifixion and resurrection; kenosis and the other; the divine image, imaging and incarnation)
• Trinity (e.g. otherness, mystery and apophasis; perichoresis and the boundaries of personhood)
• Creation (e.g. gift, givens, openness, and the place of human poiesis; ‘reality’ as divine donation and human construct)
• Revelation (e.g. language, analogy, metaphor, imagination; re-enchantment, experience, nature and culture; scripture, inspiration and authority)
• Redemption (e.g. sin, evil, guilt, notions of atonement, reconciliation and forgiveness)
• Worship (e.g. liturgy, sacraments, ritual, embodied performance, meaning and presence)
• Church (e.g. tradition, continuity and interruption; community, truth and meaning; encountering Christ in the body; the church as ‘habitus’)
• Eschatology (e.g. hope, promise and the shape of the self; hope as imagination; apocalypse and deconstruction)

Proposals on any relevant topic are welcomed."

Continental Philosophy of Religion (panel leaders: Steven Shakespare and Patrice Haynes; abstracts to shakess@hope.ac.uk and haynesp@hope.ac.uk. "This panel invites submissions which consider the turn to religion in recent continental philosophy and the implications this has for understandings of religion, reason and spiritual practice. If philosophy is called, driven or solicited to think its other, does this mean that philosophy itself is compelled by a religious dynamic? A particular focus will be on the debate around theological and dialectical accounts of materialism. What kind of thinking does justice to the passion of reason, the integrity of matter and the injunctions of ethical and political commitment? Relevant thinkers and themes might include:

• Jean-Luc Nancy,
• Radical Orthodoxy,
• Slavoj Žižek,
• Grace Jantzen,
• phenomenology (Henry, Chrétien, Lacoste, Marion),
• speculative realism/materialism.

However, other relevant submissions will be considered.
The panel is being convened by the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion."

I might submit an abstract to the Modern Theology panel that focuses on the ways in which UK emerging church milieu participants (particularly collectives) are "attending to the other" in the creation of ecclesial spaces (the church and worship streams of this panel). I'm working at the moment on the concluding sections of chapter six of my thesis, which use Derrida (particularly Of Hospitality and "Eating Well" in Points) and Badiou (Saint Paul) to argue for a Pauline ecclesiology of literally "attending to the other." As I complete my thesis, then, I'll be playing with the idea of presenting something at this conference.

New Year Write-up Round Up

So as you can probably tell from the paucity of blog posts in December, I spent the month trying to get as much as possible of my thesis written before the Christmas holidays. During that time, I managed to make a significant dent in chapters four (3 out of 4 sections completed), six (2 out of 4) and seven (2 out of 3). Chapters one and two are in a similar sort of state (half to three-quarters done), and three is mostly done but in a bit of a state structurally, but I've yet to even start writing up my notes into something remotely resembling a chapter five.

Therefore my newest timetable for completion is:

• Chapters One, Two, Three, Four, Six and Seven completed by the end of January
• Go see my Mum for my birthday at the beginning of Feb and spend a week printing and editing
• Chapter Five completed by mid-Feb
• Edit draft and submit the latter half of February.

Doable? We'll see.

Cross and Khora

Jack Caputo gave me a heads up about an edited collection about his work, Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo. It's out in January 2010, edited by Marko Zlomislic and Neal DeRoo (Neal edited a collection on phenomenology and eschatology, of which I've read a few chapters but haven't yet had time to fully review, as well as one on James K.A. Smith, which I looked at a bit here, here and here). I'm hoping Jack'll be able to get me a copy to review here and use in my thesis.

Here's a list of other books about Caputo's work:

• Roy Martinez, ed. 1997. The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics.
• James Olthuis, ed. 2002. Religion with/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo.
• Mark Dooley, ed. 2003. A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus.
• Christopher Simpson. 2009. Religion, Metaphysics and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo.

Truth Matters Conference

This summer, the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, is hosting a conference entitled "Truth Matters." The conference, which is co-sponsored by Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan), Drodt College (Sioux Center, Iowa), and Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam), will run from August 18-20 2010. It appears as though it will act as a platform for the discussion of a new interdisciplinary philosphical model of truth proposed by the organisers.

Here's some more details and the call for papers:

"We live in an age of skepticism about the idea of truth. Contemporary skeptics question the nature and value of truth and the concomitant virtue of truthfulness. Skepticism about truth is not restricted to popular culture. It occurs within the academic world, where deflationists have argued that the idea of truth is not a substantive notion and some poststructuralists have portrayed it as primarily the scene of struggles for power.

"Such skepticism is surprising, for truth and truthfulness have been central to Western civilization and the academic enterprise. Historically, the idea of truth has helped organize Western intellectual culture since ancient times. It is a central theme in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three monotheistic religions that have shaped Western society. Conceptually, the idea of truth sets a stage for fundamental debates about the point and worth of academic work: debates between realists and anti-realists in philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences, for example, or between relativists and anti-relativists in the humanities and social sciences. Societally, the idea of truth provides a normative background for ethics, law, and public discourse: we expect friends and colleagues to be truthful; we ask witnesses in courts of law to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"; and we get upset when journalists deliberately fabricate their reports.

"Given both contemporary skepticism and the centrality of truth, we believe it is time to reconceptualize truth and to reclaim truthfulness for the academic enterprise. The conference organizers have undertaken an interdisciplinary philosophical effort to develop a new model of truth. Now we wish to expand the scope of our work by engaging with discussion partners from other schools and from across the disciplines. The Truth Matters conference will be an occasion for international dialogue and debate."

The call for papers suggests these relevant topics for proposals:

• artistic and narrative truth
• power, truth, and ideology
• realism, anti-realism, and truth
• relativism, anti-relativism, and truth
• religious truth
• teaching and learning for truth
• truth in ethics
• truthfulness in public life

The call for papers invites submissions in English of 700-word proposals or papers not exceeding 3,500 words, but submissions must be formatted for blind review (separate sheet of paper for name, contact details and 2-4 key words).

The conference organisers welcome interdisciplinary approaches, and papers from graduate students. There are going to be one or two "merit-based graduate essay awards" of $250 Canadian., so don't forget to identify yourself as a student to be considered for the money!

Submission deadline: March 1, 2010.
Submission via email to: truthmatters@icscanada.edu

Here's a video interview with Lambert Zuidervaart about the conference:

Photographic Evidence of my "Being" a Theologian!

Despite the protestations to the contrary in my On-Not-Wanting-to-Be-A-Theologian theology conference paper (actual title, "On the Question of (Rightly?) Passing for A/Theologian," there appears to be more evidence that I "am" a theologian here. Dang.

Conference covered by Catholic Media

Who heard of getting international public press for presenting a paper at a theology conference?

Above: The Catholic Newspaper The Universe's coverage of Maynooth's Young Theologians conference.

I'm the one in the middle. With me are Oliver Crisp and Kevin Hargaden.

Marcus Borg

The Progressive Christianity Network (Britain) are hosting a weekend conference next September (Friday 10 - Sunday 12 Sept 2010) in Edinburgh with Marcus Borg. Registration isn't open until December 1, but I imagine it'll sell out pretty quickly. Would be interesting.

Here are links to some of his books: The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (with John Dominic Crossan); Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary; The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith; Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus; The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith; The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach Us About Jesus' Birth; and The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days.

More on Ecumenism next year

As well as the Irish School of Ecumenics' "From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century" conference, next year (the centenary of the 1910 World Mission conference in Edinburgh - click here for a firsthand account) also prompts Free to Believe's "Interfaith - The New Ecumenism?" conference, which I saw advertised here by the Progressive Christianity Network (Britain)'s . It will run from Thurs 27 - Sat 29 May 2010 at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire. It costs £140 including ensuite accommodation and meals, and the keynotes include

• Raficq Abdulla,
• Tony Bayfield (Reform Judaism),
• David Cornick (Churches Together in England),
• Alan Race (Interreligious Insight), and
• Ian Bradley (St. Andrews).

Here's some more blurb. I'm a bit reticent of the language of this blurb, particularly where it implies that members of other religions somehow need to learn to live with and love each other even more than Christians. But, here it is all the same:

"The aim of this conference, organised by Free to Believe, is to explore the possibility that interfaith is the new ecumenism. We will hear from Christians who are committed to this possibility, from Jewish and Islamic speakers about the possibilities they see for it, and from the General Secretary of Churches Together in England, David Cornick, to give him a chance to please for the continued relevance of the work for Christian unity. Where is the cutting edge of unity now?

"In the wise words of the French Roman Catholic Cardinal Mercier: 'In order to unite with one another, we must love one another; in order to love one another, we must know one another; in order to konw one another, we must go and meet one another.' Today, while those words still apply among Christians, do they not apply with even greater force to those of other great world religions like Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Sikh? Can we live together? Can we learn to love each other?"

But, anyway, the reason I've posted a few conferences on ecumenism is that I'm thinking through what I want to do next in my academic career (forgetting for now that I haven't yet finished my thesis!) and the question, "where is the cutting edge of unity now?" is particularly interesting to me. I'm hoping to build on my thesis' identification of an "a/theistic cultural imaginary" to ask how this social imaginary imagines and performs "society" and "sociality." My thesis focuses on emerging church discourse (interview data, published literature, online media, participant observation) so I hope to look next at how what is spoken about actually gets done in practice. It's relatively easy to see how individuals might adopt a deconstructive theology as a worldview, but how might a collective "do" deconstructive theology? How might a collective "be" deconstructive? Particularly given Derrida's concerns about "community"? Anyway, I'll post a bit more about how I see this research developing later, as I'm in the middle of trying to put something more concrete together.