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Tocqueville suggested that the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe. This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological and political analysis. It has become more difficult to believe that humanity's progress necessarily leads to atheism, or that it is possible to translate all that is good about religion into reasonable terms acceptable in principle by all, believers as well as nonbelievers. And yet, the spread of Enlightenment values, of an independent public sphere, and of alternative projects of modernity continues unabated and is by no means the antithesis of the renewed vigor of religious beliefs. The chapters in this book shed light on a hypothesis that helps to account for such an unexpected convergence of enlightenment and religion in our times: Religion has reentered the public sphere because it puts into question the relation between God and the concept of political sovereignty. In the first part, new perspectives are brought to bear on the tension-ridden connection between theophany and state-building from the perspective of world religions. Globalized, neo-liberal capitalism has been another crucial factor in loosening the bond between God and the state, as the chapters in the second part show. The chapters in the third part are dedicated to a critique of the premises of political theology, starting from the possibility of a prior, perhaps deeper relation between democracy and theocracy. The book concludes with three chapters dedicated to examining Tocqueville in order to think about the religion of democracy beyond the idea of civil religion.

In France today, philosophy—in particular phenomenology—finds itself in a paradoxical relation to theology. Some debate a “theological turn.” Others disavow theological arguments as if it would tarnish their philosophical integrity, while carrying out theology in other venues. But no one deliberately attempts to cross this divide by taking responsibility in his own thought for each discipline in its own right. In braving “the crossing of the Rubicon,” Falque seeks to end this face-off. Convinced that “the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes,” he proposes a counterblow by theology against phenomenology. Instead of another philosophy of “the threshold” or of “the leap,” he argues that an encounter between the two disciplines, insofar as each is fully assumed, will reveal their mutual fruitfulness and, at the same time, their true distinctive borders. In this book, he looks back and forward at his own work in the borderlands of philosophy and theology. He seeks to provide an account for his method in moving, for example, between Levinas, Ricoeur, and the Catholic Eucharist in generating his Catholic hermeneutic of the body and voice, or between Bultmann, Merleau-Ponty, and Aquinas in terms of a reflection on the activity of believing. Falque shows thus that he has made the crossing: alea iacta est, “the die is cast” with audacity and perhaps a little recklessness, but knowing full well that no one thinks without exposing themself to risk.

This book provides a series of approaches to the ancient question of whether and how God is a matter of “experience”, or, alternately, to what extent the notion of experience can be true to itself if it does not include God. On the one hand, it seems impossible to experience God: the deity does not offer Himself to sense experience. On the other hand, there have been mystics who have claimed to have encountered God. The essays in this collection seek to explore the topic again, drawing insights from phenomenology, theology, literature, and feminism. Throughout, this collection maintains a strong connection with concrete rather than abstract approaches to God.

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of over easy answers, with a singular, totalizing “God” and the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting—indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions. With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, this book offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. It maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities—more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness. Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we find the divine in memory, the book argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations lead us not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar and paradoxical life in the flesh.

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human animality create ineradicable contradictions within accounts of human life and also install an anti-ecological impulse at the heart of Christian theology, this project constructively imagines a theological anthropology centered upon human commonality with fellow creatures. This constructive work perceives divine grace at work in human instincts, desires, and enmeshment in quotidian relations (rather than in rationality, language, and transcendence). The broadest arc of the book’s argument is that only a thickly articulated self-understanding rooted in creaturely commonality can provide an adequate basis for responding to ongoing ecological degradation. The conjunction of Critical Animal Studies with constructive theology in this study, then, aims to generate a new approach to ecological theology. The book’s analysis places ancient Christians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus along with contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg in critical conversation with theorists of human-animal relations from Jacques Derrida and Kelly Oliver to Valerie Plumwood and Giorgio Agamben.

This book interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as its point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, the book considers the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. It offers accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.

This book reconfigures recent secularism debates, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society’s radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. For Gourgouris, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation’s sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human.

Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

Denying existence to certain others, while still tolerating diversity, stabilizes a political order in a society; or does it? Addressing this classical question of political thought, Other Others intervenes both to the study of the Talmud and Jewish Thought in its aftermath, and to political theory in general. Braking through the horizon of the currently predominant approaches to the concept of the political in political ontology and political theology, the book turns to the Talmud. In light and despite these theories, the pages of the Talmud provide a (dis)appearing display of the interpersonal rather than intersubjective political, which entails a radically different take on what engaging others means in society. The book shows how philosophy- and theology-driven approaches to the concept of the political have tacitly elided a concept of the interpersonal political, which the Talmud exemplifies. Both addressing and resisting such an elision, the book rereads the Talmud, while at the same time and by the same move reconsidering contemporary political theory. At the center of the analysis are figures of excluded others – of the “other others” who programmatically do not claim any “original” belonging to a territory and therefore by the logic of the currently predominant schools of political thought are questionable in their right to exist. The Political moves from a modern political figure of “Jews” as such “other others” to the Talmud, arriving, at the end, to a demand to think earth anew, now beyond the notions of territory, land, nationalism, internationalism, or even beyond the scope of a territorialized universe.

This book is a revised and expanded edition of three lectures delivered by the author at Wake Forest University in 1979. Long out of print, in its new edition it should be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of the philosophy of religion. The first two lectures, after a critique of the incompleteness of St. Thomas Aquinas's famous Five Ways of arguing for the existence of God, explore lesser-known resources of Aquinas's philosophical ascent of the mind to God: the unrestricted dynamism of the human spirit as it reaches toward the fullness of being, and the strictly metaphysical ascent to God from finite to infinite, in the line of Aquinas's later, more Neoplatonically inspired, metaphysics of participation. The third, and most heavily revised, lecture is a critique of Whitehead's process philosophy, distinguishing Aquinas more sharply and critically from Whitehead than in the first edition.

Postcolonial theology has recently emerged as a site of intense intellectual and political energy and has taken its place in the interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies. This book is animated by the conviction that postcolonial theology is now ready for a second, deeper phase of engagement with postcolonial theory, one that moves beyond the general to the specific. No critic has been more emblematic of the challenging and contested field of postcolonial theory than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In this volume, the product of a theological colloquium in which Spivak herself participated, theologians and biblical scholars engage with her thought in order to catalyze a diverse range of original theological and exegetical projects. The book opens with a topography of postcolonial theology and also includes other valuable introductory chapters. At the center of the collection are transcriptions of two extended public dialogues with Spivak on theology and religion in general. A further dozen chapters appropriate Spivak's work for theological and ethical reflection.

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy—Levinas’s ethics of the Other and Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life “without a why.” Rather than aligning immanence with the enclosures of the subject, The Self-Emptying Subject engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates and subjects life in secular no less than in religious domains, this book challenges the dominant distribution of concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse, which insists on associating transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. This book argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G.W.F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative re-writing of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical archives (Bataille).

The last half century has seen both attempts to demythologize the idea of God into purely secular forces and the resurgence of the language of “God” as indispensable to otherwise secular philosophers for describing experience. This book asks whether “piety” might be a sort of irreducible human problematic: functioning both inside and outside religion.

A leading Italian feminist philosopher and the Archbishop of Milan face off over the contemporary meaning of the biblical commandment not to kill. The result is a series of erudite and wide-ranging arguments that move from murder and suicide to just war and drone strikes, from bioethics and biopolitics to hermeneutics and philology, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, from Torah and Scripture to art and literature, from the essence of human dignity and the paradoxes of fratricide to the finer points of Lévinasian ethics. Less a direct debate than a disputation in the classical sense, Thou Shall Not Kill proves to be a searching meditation on one of the unstated moral premises shared by otherwise bitterly opposed political factions. It will stimulate the mind of the novice while also reminding more advanced readers of the necessity and desirability of thinking in the present.

The question of religion was a major preoccupation for Jacques Derrida especially during the last years of his life. His writings on this theme have continued to inspire and provoke, and they have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion provides a compact introduction to this debate, bringing together contributions by some of the best-known voices in the field, as well as work by younger scholars. It considers Derrida’s fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity; it broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition; and it examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam. The volume concludes with a debate between John Caputo and Martin Hägglund about the meaning of Derrida's use of religious themes and concepts, and poses the question of whether deconstruction can be valuable resource for religious philosophy or whether it is radically atheistic. The discussion gets to the heart of controversies about deconstruction—its ethical implications and its political ambitions. It shows how religious ideas were both adopted and re-worked by Derrida in ways that had a profound impact on both his own intellectual development and on the history of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Within the humanities, specifically in the past decade, trauma theory has become a robust site of interdisciplinary work. Trauma resonates with scholars in and across disciplines and has become a trope with a distinctive significance. The scope of scholarship on trauma has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma. This volume gathers scholars in a variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma in light of its burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. From distinctive disciplinary vectors, the work of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians consider the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence. By bringing together scholars at the intersections of trauma, social theory, and especially the continental philosophy of religion, this volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s transcendent, evental, or unassimilable quality is being wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it is promulgated as a form of obscurantism.

What does it mean to be called “human”? How does this nomination affect or effect what it means to be called “divine”? This book responds to these related questions in intertwined explorations of the passionate trials—examinations, tests, and ordeals—of Antigone and Jesus. Impelled by her love of the impossible, Antigone crosses uncrossable boundaries, transgresses norms of kinship and mortality, confounds distinctions of nature and culture, and, in the process, unearths and critiques the sexism implicit in humanism. Antigone thus disrupts humanist traditions stretching from Sophocles to Martin Heidegger—traditions that would render her subhuman or inhuman. She survives these exclusions and engenders a new mode of humanity, one that destabilizes classic oppositions of life and death and affirms mortal finitude in the face of the future's unforeseeability. This new mode of humanity offers a new way of considering Jesus, whom Christianity identifies as human and divine. Building on his reading of Antigone, the author, through a close reading of Mark's gospel focused on Jesus' cry of abandonment from the cross, shows that to refigure humanity is also to refigure divinity and their relation. In the first extended treatment of Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus in English, the author draws on the theoretical insights of Jacques Derrida and Nancy to propose an innovative account of Jesus' humanity and divinity—one that can contribute to religious understandings of embodiment and prayer and can open avenues of inquiry into tragedy, sexual difference, posthumanism, and politics. By pairing Antigone and Jesus and engaging the work of Judith Butler, Simone Weil, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Dominique Janicaud, this book constructively participates in interdisciplinary conversations at the nexus of religious, philosophical, literary, and gender studies.

The focus of this book is morals—how human beings should live their lives. For this book (and Thomas Aquinas) “morals” is “the journey of the rational creature toward God.” While philosophical considerations are central here, Christian revelation and its truth constitute an enveloping context. The chapters in this book are chapters which treat the history of philosophy as a development that proceeds by deepening appreciation of basic questions rather than the constant replacement of one worldview by another. Thus, the book finds forebears in Plato and Aristotle, in Augustine and Boethius, and especially in Aquinas. Written over a period of more than thirty years, the chapters in this book treat both perennial issues in philosophy and such current questions as suicide as a weapon of war, the death penalty, and lying. Above all, they present the wisdom, the sapiential vision, that makes morals possible.