The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

The Eucharist before Nature and Culture

This article examines the claim by Bruno Latour that the modern division between the realms of nature and culture is in collapse. Following Latour, the division of nature and culture is located within a “modern constitution” which also includes the bracketing of God and a non-theological ontology. Technology is examined as a means of overcoming the chaotic collapse of the dualism of nature and culture. Particular reference is made to the work of Donna Haraway. However, it is argued that technology, in being mimetic, is not able to re-configure the relationship between nature and culture. Instead, through a comparison of the theologies of John Calvin and St. Thomas Aquinas, nature and culture are seen to be reconfigured in a non-mimetic understanding of the Eucharist in which the natural and cultural elements of the Church's liturgy reach their telos through participation in the divine life.     

The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization

This essay explores Eucharist as resistance to late-capitalist globalization. Globalization is often touted as the first true realization of catholicity. Globalization is seen as the demise of the nation-state which has caused so much division among peoples. In contrast, I argue that globalization does not signal the decline of the nation-state but the perfection of the modern state's subsumption of local communities under the universal. True catholicity is based in the practice of the Eucharist, which realizes a universal communion but does so only in local Eucharistic communities, thus overcoming the dichotomy of universal and particular.     

作为文字语言的语调

本文所谓语调是一种广义的语言之语调.它一方面是语词之音调,语句之声调,言语之论调;另一方面也潜存于语言文字乃至行为语言之中,是文本和行为的主旨和基调.把握作为文字语言的语调关键是理解四个"化",即:抽象化,间接化,内在化,符号化,以及通过这四化把语言、符号、文字、声音和语调完全打通.