Planting Some New Thoughts on the Landscape

In this comment on Jonathan Glover's Alien Landscapes? I'll focus on two issues: social cognition in autism, and delusions; and I'll introduce a new topic – solitary confinement – as a supplement to Glover's far‐ranging analyses.     

Balthasar avec Kristeva: On the Recovery of a Baroque Teresa of Avila

This article suggests that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s critique of hyper‐subjectivism in Spanish Carmelite mysticism can be valuably supplemented by Julia Kristeva’s experimental novel Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. In particular, I argue that Kristeva’s characterization of St. Teresa of Avila as a “baroque” subject nuances Balthasar’s critique, as the novel complicates the apparent binaries of immanence‐transcendence and subject‐object, presenting baroque subjectivity as dramatic, plural, porous, complicated, de‐centered, ek‐static, and erotic, inhabiting and inhabited by an o/Other, a construction of the subject which resists by definition the pull of a psychological solipsism. Moreover, the article suggests that Kristeva’s novel operates as a powerful rhetorical mechanism not only for bringing Teresa to life in a new way, but also for unveiling both Balthasar’s internal inconsistencies as well as his internal resources, the latter of which include his reflections on baroque representation and theatricality, particularly with respect to Ignatius of Loyola, and his figurations of selfhood and sainthood in terms both of liquidity and as “expropriated” and “unselved.”     

WHAT MAKES A QUANTUM PHYSICS BELIEF BELIEVABLE? MANY-WORLDS AMONG SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST

An extraordinary, if circumscribed, positive shift has occurred since the mid-twentieth century in the perceived status of Hugh Everett III's 1956 theory of the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, now widely called the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Everett's starkly new interpretation denied the existence of a separate classical realm, contending that the experimental data can be seen as presenting a state vector for the whole universe. Since there is no state vector collapse, reality as a whole is strictly deterministic. Explained jointly by the dynamical variables and the state vector, “this reality is not the reality we customarily think of, but is a reality composed of many worlds,” wrote Everett's colleague Bryce DeWitt. In this essay, I account briefly for the change of status in conventional scientific terms, yet chiefly in extended terms of three sets of ideas that I argue can be understood to affect believability in both scientific and religious contexts, illuminating helpfully the MWI phenomenon, and its engagement with theology: orthodoxy and heresy, language and reference, and faith and agnosticism. One's orientation relative to the variable content of these dynamic, socially oriented categories helps to make belief in ideas as metaphysically challenging as Everettian Quantum Mechanics, or particular ideas about God, either more or less believable. The categories will have the same function in a theology engaging Everett's theory, and in any theology at all written in a society deeply marked by what I further argue is a subtle, powerful, and pervasive mode of quasi-scientific thinking we can call societal constructive agnosticism, of which anyone doing theology today must be aware.