Intimate Distance: Rethinking the Unthought God in Christianity

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God.

Reflections of the Aging Caesar: Drama as Cultural Perspective

This article affirms the view that literature transmits multiple reflections on human life that shape social mores. Examining stereotypes of age in literature as socially constructed artifacts reveals the prevailing attitudes toward aging during that time. This study focuses on the aging Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Writing 300 years apart, these two great playwrights inscribe both positive and negative models of aging, reflecting views in their eras that persist today. This article identifies these models, then explores them from a Lacanian standpoint, showing that each dramatist focuses on Caesar's ego development through the opinions of other characters. Offering a primarily negative view of aging, Shakespeare emphasizes the fragmented mirror images that other characters hold up to Caesar. Shaw self-consciously counters Shakespeare by foregrounding Caesar as subject, who beholds his aging self in the mirror of others' opinions while enacting a positive model of aging. Tracing this long tradition of aging stereotypes found in the two plays can be useful as scholars continue to reconstruct society's attitudes toward aging.     

SCIENTISM AND TECHNOLOGY AS RELIGIONS

Abstract. Jacques Ellul, by far the most significant author in the serious discussions on the interface between religion and technology, is apparently not known to the science‐and‐religion field. The reason is the imprecise use of the terminology. In scientific formulation the relationship can be summarized as technology /religion:: science/theology. The first pair are robust three‐dimensional templates of most human experience; the second pair are linear, abstract concerns of a minority of citizens. In the parallel community—now well developed throughout academia—of science, technology, and society, where the technology/religion matters have been discussed more than the science/religion pair, John Caiazza's point that “techno‐secularism is the real problem” has been front and center for some decades. Among the theologians most aware of this, Raimundo Panikkar, Langdon Gilkey, and Huston Smith, Smith is the one who has taken the case much further than Caiazza, recognizing the danger of the real theological challenge from the religion of scientism and actively working against it. I write from a unique background among those involved in this debate—that of being deeply embedded simultaneously both in the modern science and technology establishment and in the reform of the religious enterprise for fifty years. I make the case that matters are worse than even Smith posits. He shows that scientism as a fundamentalist modern secularism serves the exact function of the theology behind the practiced religion of America and the West, that is, technology. An unexpected ray of hope has appeared in the sudden emergence of whole‐person healing (also known as complementary and alternative medicine), which is used regularly by well over half the population. This reintroduction of the spiritual dimension into this key technology of health will certainly be a major turning point.     

Deconstruction and creation: an Augustinian deconstruction of Derrida

In recent continental philosophy of religion there has been significant attention paid to the Abrahamic doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, especially by deconstructive thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, and Keller. For these thinkers, the doctrine represents a form of agency that does violence to various forms of alterity. While broadly supportive of their fundamental philosophical and ethico-political views, especially about the primordiality of alterity, I differ from them in that I argue that creation ex nihilo articulates the very structure of the alterity they are concerned with. The essay proceeds through a reading of Derrida’s representation of the doctrine and a “deconstruction” of his view by means of a reading of Augustine and Anselm.     

TREATING TRANSGENDERED CHILDREN: CLINICAL METHODS AND RELIGIOUS MYTHOLOGY

Bruce Lincoln suggests that myth is “that small class of stories that possess both credibility and authority” (1992, 24). When studying the history of mythology we find that myths often are understood as something other people have—as if the group in question possesses the truth while others live by falsehoods. In examining contemporary North American society, we can see how Judeo‐Christian narratives structure popular and medical discourses regarding sex and gender. The idea that humans are born into male and female, and male and female only, is a deeply held belief—so much so that it appears as fact rather than belief. Anthropologists such as Serena Nanda and Will Roscoe have documented the cross‐cultural and historical “gender variants” who exist in societies where three or more genders are the norm. The origin of the belief in two sexes could well be the opening verses of Genesis where the origin of the human species is described in bipolar, dimorphic forms: “… in the image of God He created them; male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:27 NRSV). In the article I explore the mythology that underlies the clinical management of transgender children.     

A posthumanist reading of knowledge in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan

This article proposes a posthumanist reading of knowledge in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan from four interconnected aspects. First, knowledge is inseparable from practice, as is exemplified in Lacan’s original rewriting of Zhuangzi’s ‘agreement between name and actuality’ as the dialectic relationship between Other and other. Then, knowledge leads us to explore the mysterious knowledge behind the surface, which resists linguistic expression and defies human agency. Furthermore, the importance of the mysterious knowledge compels us to figure out the accesses to reach this unknown territory. Finally, the availability of the opaque knowledge, in a circular form, returns to the beginning question albeit on a more advanced level: the methods of putting the unknown knowledge into practice. Apart from these four logical aspects, the new perspective of posthumanism enables us to go beyond anthropocentric understanding of knowledge and bracket it within a broad framework of cross-species becoming.     

Whose Place is This Anyway? Reflecting upon Hospitality and Higher Education

In this essay I propose that using online tools to connect geographically‐separated classrooms for real‐time collaborative learning experiences may effectively develop intercultural competency in the religious studies classroom. I explore personal examples from several international and inter‐institutional collaborations with Jacques Derrida's reflections on hospitality to explain how using online tools in this way productively puts into question conventions about place, host, and guest. This engagement of students in collaboration with others beyond their classroom is effective because it takes the focus of learning past facts students might learn towards how they are communicating to learn.     

Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings

This article asks the question: “What does it mean to think about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ when migratory experience is enmeshed with the story of depression?”. The article focuses on the personal story of a woman who migrated from the United States (US) to Australia, and whose sense of disconnection and displacement in relation to everyday life is embedded within a narrative of depression. Our discussion of her twin narratives of emotional distress and migration is located within theoretical debates about depression, migration and the constitution of subjectivity. In particular, we draw on psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity to argue that her emotional distress and the medical diagnosis of depression together represent a form of ‘experienc[ing] oneself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005), and function as a precondition to her narrative of migration. Ultimately, we conclude, the woman's intertwined narratives of depression and migration operate simultaneously to provide retroactive order to her subjectivity.     

Interrogating Healthy Conflict

The need to turn an enemy into an adversary is an ethical obligation. I try to show that this obligation has multiple religious and philosophical resources. The ethical imperative also requires us to not overstate and magnify any problem at hand to the point that it becomes insurmountable and enmity becomes an end in itself. I do ask the question whether Springs thinks of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest by taking the knee at football games as an instance of healthy conflict. Are the terms peace and healthy conflict perhaps not better viewed as allegories for the interrogation of the human condition? Perhaps healthy conflict remains a series of questions rather than concrete outcomes.     

The Strength of "Creative Impulse" in the Aftermath of Trauma Discussion of 'I Made a Picture of My Life—a Life from the Picture' by Pirkko Siltala

Abstract

The author presents aspects of the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi, and between the members of Freud's inner circle as it appears in their correspondence, to illustrate the correspondences as well as the non-correspondences and conflicts which arose among them.