Read harder!

There are certain figures who, as it turns out, are always saying something more nuanced and just plain better than one customarily recognizes. When one puts forward a straightforward reading of the figure and then suggests that certain features of his or her thought may be improvable in some way, the figure’s defenders spring into action.

The figure, we learn, has already anticipated the critique and so thoroughly debunked it as to render it laughable. Indeed, the figure has conclusively demonstrated — for those with eyes to see — that the aspects of his or her thought that are supposedly bad or at least capable of improvement, are in fact absolutely necessary and good. The very terms in which the figure is being critiqued are decisively overcome and rendered moot by the figure’s work, making the critique naive and, if we’re going to be frank, even a little sad. If only people would sit down and read a little harder, they wouldn’t say such dumb things and they would have access to the abundance of good and nuanced ideas in the figure.

Summer Reading: Omensetter’s Luck

My original plan was finally to read Mason & Dixon. It was all prepared. I had some twenty hours on a plane over the course of three weeks; long afternoons in Belgian cafes, those littering the sides of countryside canals mostly, but a few in small Limburg towns. A perfect time for Pynchon, I told myself. When time came to pack, however, I discovered that my copy of the massive novel simply did not fit comfortably into my lone carry-on bag. Thus it came to pass that I instead brought along William Gass’ difficult (but, I was soon to discover, not too difficult) first novel, Omensetter’s Luck.

The relationship started off a little rocky. I struggled with and against it so badly on the plane that I gave up, opting for something more immediately palatable on the in-flight entertainment screen in front of me. I will never get back those hours watching Date Night, Sherlock Holmes, 500 Greatest Goals, and a special about the football rivalry between Argentina & Brazil. Even upon settling into the pace of life in Belgium I found the damn thing, except for the end of section two,^* sluggish. But then it happened. And by “it,” I mean page 125. it was here that one of the novel’s main characters, the Reverend Jethro Furber, described his parishioners thusly:

Interview with Clayton Crockett

AUFS contributor Clayton Crockett has an interview up at Columbia UP’s website about the forthcoming edited volume Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: From the title we know this will be a tour de force on Hegel; what debates do you want to spark among readers?

Clayton Crockett: In Theology and Religious Studies, there’s been this return to Paul, sparked largely by Badiou’s book Saint Paul. We wanted to help mark a similar return to Hegel. The major issue has been the stereotypical postmodern view of Hegel as a totalizing thinker who suppresses all differences. But this interpretation of Hegel has been shown to be problematic by thinkers like Zizek and Catherine Malabou. We wanted to include people and positions that were closer to the original postmodern suspicion of Hegel as well as bring in the more recent views.

Q: Scholars and supporters of Hegel’s dialectic feel that he has been marginalized and misunderstood; what about his philosophy has been misconstrued and how will your book set the record straight?

CC: After World War II, Hegel was cast as the thinker of totality in European thought, and a genuine philosophy of difference had to break with Hegel—this is the perspective of Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas. Of course, this is a simplification and distortion of Hegel, as Zizek and Malabou, among others, have shown. The logic of the dialectic has been read as progressive and accumulative, it’s this engine that swells up and subsumes all distinctions, differences and singularities. Malabou and Zizek, influenced by deconstruction and post-structuralism, have convincingly demonstrated that the Hegelian dialectic “works” by not working, by breaking down and exposing the gap that persists between reality and our ideals. It’s not that the dialectic gets reality to become our ideal; it’s that the dialectic shows how reality IS the irreducible gap within our ideals themselves.

One question I would have for Clayton (or for anyone really) is whether there’s a connection between the “return to Paul” and a “return to Hegel” — as I have found myself, during a summer in which I’m enacting my own kind of “return to Paul,” also drawn toward a deeper engagement with Hegel (partly inspired by my reading of Gillian Rose).

Sketch for a Typology of the Apocalyptic

Some time ago Daniel Barber and I were talking about the ascendancy of “the apocalyptic” in recent Christian theology and I rattled off a typology of different positions, in so far as I understand them. The notion of a typology came as I had recently taught Niebuhr’s different Christ and Culture types and find this sort of bestowing of identity to be a useful heuristic for mapping out the differences between positions and also for freeing up some space for different uses of a good name. As a heuristic, of course, there is room for divergence and tendency between these positions, and the typology is only a kind of virtual map that can be used in navigating while, because a map is also a construction, may come to change our relationship to the territory.

As I see it there are three basic positions being bandied about, which I have titled:

• The Paradoxical Apocalyptic
• Apocalyptic Nihilism
• Insurgent Apocalyptics

A brief thought on questions of Pauline authorship

I’ve finally made my way through Paul’s undisputed letters in Greek and am now aiming to read all the epistles this summer (having already read 1-3 John, James, 2 Peter, and Jude — the latter two because of the recent discussion of sodomy). This has been an excellent exercise for shoring up my Greek skills, but the main intellectual result has been to soften or nuance some of my views on Paul. First of all, I realize that I went into this project believing that I would find some clear overarching “Pauline system,” but that ran aground in Galatians — there’s something about having to work through a text in agonizing detail that makes it very difficult to breeze over things, which I was predisposed to do whenever I came across the clear contradictions in Galatians.

The solution, it seems, is to recognize change and development in Paul’s thought, which seems a sensible enough position in retrospect but which was apparently unavailable to me initially because of an unreflected-upon “scriptural authority” that Paul the man, if not all the letters under the name of Paul, still had for me. Once it is permissible to assume that Paul’s position is evoluving, though, I wonder how much the question of authorship matters.

Book Discussion Group: Kleinzeit

With summer escaping so quickly, I thought I should better seize this unclaimed moment to see if anybody was still interested in reading & discussing Russell Hoban’s divisive, but delightfully brief, novel Kleinzeit. It is less than 200 pages, so surely we can power through it quite quickly, if we have a collective mind to do so. In two weeks, say?

If you’re interested, I was hoping that we might be able to give four or five posts to it. Ideally, each written by four or five different contributors. No summary, of course. We’re far more creative than that, I hope. Personal reactions, maybe; complaints, even; pale imitations; literary masterpieces; a compare & contrast essay — really, however you want to roll.

Before we get ahead of ourselves with such details, though, we should probably suss out whether any of you lot are interested. Otherwise, you’re stuck with me again. Let me know in the comments so we can get the ball rolling before a new school term kicks off.

How about the power… to move you: On Inception

I should start by saying that, contrary to this otherwise excellent article, I don’t believe that Inception is intended to be “all a dream.” (Spoilers follow.)

Crowdsourcing: Movies for a Christology and Atonement Course

A friend of mine and sometimes commenter here, Stu Jesson, is teaching a course next year on Christology and Atonement. He asked if I had any ideas for films as he’s like incorporate a couple of films as part of the teaching to help give the students access to the material in different ways. I couldn’t really think of much, so I thought I’d turn to the blog. Any thoughts on good films for thinking about sacrifice/scapegoating, or examples of substitutionary logic?

Joke and economy

Indulging in some gallows humor about the state of the academic job market, a friend and I were trying to come up with genuine growth industries where one’s career would be relatively assured. We came up with payday lending, collections agencies, and for-profit prisons. It’s all in good fun, of course — but as I thought further, it was sincerely difficult to come up with a growth field that didn’t involve extraction of some kind, whether extracting natural resources, extracting money from the poor through predatory lending, or extracting tax dollars from the government. (Ideally, of course, you would combine all three.)

Can anyone provide counter-examples?

Interview in the local newspaper

I just thought I would share that I’ve been interviewed by the local newspaper about the absence of young adults from the church.  Of course, as I expected, only a fraction of my interview made it into the final cut of the article, but I think it’s important to connect with the public in this way in my ministerial self-understanding as a “public theologian.”  And I am grateful to the newspaper and Andrea Gillhooley for including me.