A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

Richard Rorty and the pragmatic turn in the study of religion

Recent interest in the pragmatic tradition draws much of its impetus from the work of Richard Rorty and his critics. This paper argues that Rorty's late interest in religion derives from his abiding interests in American liberalism and not specifically from his Pragmatism. Students of religion, however, have much to learn from the pragmatic tradition and over the last 25 years work by Wayne Proudfoot, Jeffrey Stout, and others has been important in establishing a pluralist approach to the study of religion that avoids the pitfalls of foundationalism, essentialism, and dogmatism in understanding religion and religious phenomena. The continued pursuit of this approach, the essay concludes, will help students of religion avoid unnecessary worries about theories and methods.     

The erosion of sexual dimorphism: challenges to religion and religious ethics

Late modernity has been witnessing the erosion of the dimorphic sexual paradigm that, in both strong and weak forms, has characterized human history as we know it. Recent discoveries in biology and the social sciences have combined with altered patterns in human sexual behavior to raise critical new questions about the inherited paradigm. Religions of the West whose sacred texts, mythologies, and codes of behavior assume that maleness and femaleness are exclusive and complementary types of sexuality-each of which determines sexual identity, reproductive role, social role, and the sex of one's partner-increasingly must grapple with both theoretical evidence for and experiential evidence of polymorphous human sexuality. Inherited categories of dimorphic sexuality not only are challenged but become less and less intelligible.     

Before ethics: scientific accounts of action at the turn of the century

This paper traces the intellectual trajectories of the first stand-alone theories of action, understood as both axiologically neutral and quasi-scientific from a methodological point of view. I argue that the rise of action theory of this kind corresponds to a particular moment of dissatisfaction within Western thought, and as such, it tells us far more about the history of philosophy than the subject itself. I conclude by explaining why subsequent failures to provide an acceptable theory of action are not accidental. On the contrary, such failures owe themselves probably to the fact that formulating a theory of action is neither propitious nor useful. Thus, the most valuable lesson we can learn from philosophical desires for a theory of action is that we should take co-action as the starting point in our normative investigations, rather than positing action simpliciter as a problem to solve. That is, instead of postulating a theory of action, we should think of a paradigm shift, whereby we move away from a representational paradigm in philosophy towards a co-actional one.     

Mikel Burley (ed.): Wittgenstein,religion, and ethics

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Honoring the duallium: disability,environmental ethics,and the implicit religion of gardening

In recent years, the pilgrimage shrine of La Sainte-Baume has attracted an increasing number of non-Catholic pilgrims influenced by the ‘New Age’ and the Neopagan movement. These pilgrims consider Mary Magdalene as a sort of female counterpart of Jesus and the mountain of La Sainte-Baume, where according to a Christian legend she spent the last part of her life, as a ‘power place’ charged with ‘healing energy’. Based on 3 years of field work among Mary Magdalene pilgrims and drawing on Tanya Luhrmann's idea of ‘interpretive drift’ (1989), the essay describes the way in which these pilgrims gradually shift from their previous Christian background towards what they generally identify as ‘spirituality’. The pilgrims reconceptualise La Sainte-Baume and its saint, and make their own a shrine they feel was misappropriated and unjustly monopolised by the ‘Church’.     

Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology

This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5–6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse’s becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological.     

Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson (eds.): Ineffability: an exercise in comparative philosophy of religion

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion: theoretical,historical and comparative considerations

In this article I analyse Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion. In the first section I develop a theoretical argument concerning the relationship among diaspora, transnationalism and Orthodoxy. Seen through these lenses, transnationalism represents a newfound situation connected to the epochal shift from empires to nation-states. I then give a historical overview of demographic trends which shows that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries millions of Orthodox emigrated to North America and Western Europe; while large Orthodox groups were created in the USA by the early twentieth century, the majority of Orthodox immigrants to Canada, Australia and Western Europe are post-1945 arrivals. I then offer a brief overview of the situation of Orthodox transnationalism in the post-Soviet space since 1989, and argue that in contrast to that situation, it is the experience of migration that is most accurately captured by the label of religious transnationalism. Lastly, I conduct an initial comparison of North American and European experiences. The current fragmentation of Orthodox jurisdictions reflects the creation of autonomous church organisations or groups of parishes that extend the jurisdictions of Mother Churches into the host states. I contemplate the consequences of religious transnationalism for future developments.