“What if Church is a Verb?”: Mary Daly is apparently now Methodist

For years, a perpetual reminder of my failed attempt to be ordained in the United Methodist Church was a decaying billboard that was never changed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit that I used often–the “Harrisburg East” exit–with the denomination’s “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” ad campaign.  I always scoffed at the sign and even occasionally found it deeply and offensively dishonest.  How could they possibly say that about themselves?

It is fairly obvious that the United Methodist Church has politically moved to the right in the past ten years–perhaps begining just over ten years ago, the UMC de-accredited the University of Chicago, Harvard, Union, and others, forbidding their seminarians to attend these schools.  The past decade has seen Bishop C. Joseph Sprague threatened with a heresy trial; the Institute for Religion and Democracy demonstrate their influence on the African Methodist jurisdictions (there’s a great article in the most recent issue of Geez magazine about this); and some resolution on the status of homosexuality, namely, that it’s bad. A church court even upheld the right of a pastor to deny membership into a church based on the pastor’s enforcement of sexual holiness. One indication that Wesleyan theology had disappeared from the denomination came when they passed new rules that actually invalidates a Methodist’s baptism if they dabble in Mormonism and return back to the mother church.  Apparently, Wesley’s teaching of prevenient grace became invalidated when a Mormon became elected governor of Massachusetts.

Things I’ve Learned Along the Way: Part One

Today on this Memorial Day, when we celebrate friends and family who have fallen and will never again get up, I found myself reminiscing about the good and bad decisions I’ve made in my life — things that moved me along this mortal coil of life, for better and worse. Life is too short for living in the past, as they say — for reveling in the glory days or regretting lost years –but perhaps not for rueful memories that might bear instruction for others. To this end, I am beginning a new sporadic series here at AUFS called “Things I’ve Learned Along the Way.”

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If you began your academic life in religious studies at an explicitly evangelical institution of higher learning, and if you have aspirations to continue this life in any professional sense, either (a) remain an open evangelical for the duration, or (b) abandon evangelicalism by the time you start graduate school.

Mythology, Madness and Laughter – Fichte’s Laughter 3.5.-3.7

Žižek continues his reading of Fichte by renewing his claim that what is radical in Fichte’s thought is the “absolutely central role of the notion of limitation” or finitude (151). Žižek holds that this is what separates Fichte from the “idealist realism” of Descartes or Leibniz, because “for Fichte, the relationship of the I and the non-I is one of mutual limitation” (152). This is a consequence of the practical focus on Fichte’s work, for the I is orientated towards the outside, which it can only experience as “pathic”, as an obstacle to its activity, while it nevertheless being necessary to continue to be oriented in this way. Here Žižek returns to a rather facile (in my view) division between human beings and animals to argue for his point, saying that what separates human beings from other animals is that human beings are aware that they are being limited, while animals simply come up against an obstacle wh2ereby they are simply constrained. In short, the animal has no transcendental subjectivity. I’ll return to this point at the end in my reflections, but I don’t think our discussion of this division needs to be repeated.

The question of the mutual limitation opens up to what Žižek sees as the problem of Fichte (along with some other interpreters): “how to pass from the I to the non-I as an in-itself that has a consistency outside the I’s reflexive self-movement?” (154). The solution proposed by Pierre Livet is that of a non-external I (or non-I) within the I itself. For a psychoanalytic reader like Žižek there is a similarity to the Lacanian-Freudian figure of the neighbour, the primordial Other, yet he tells us this doesn’t quite work since the Neighbour qua Thing is not another subject.

On Asking Why

Recently, we as a blog were asked by another blogger about our motivations for doing whatever it is we do here and thinking about whatever it is we think about. As one might expect, we each scoffed at the notion that (a) we should even consider responding, and I supplemented this by claiming (b) that the question of motivations is on par with asking (of yourself & of others) “Why?”:

So for the most part, I am out of academia; and yet, all the same, I am still very much engaged with it. You would, I suppose, ask then, “WHY?” But I think this is in fact a deeply unhelpful question. It’s important to remember that it is one of those questions that children ask repeatedly of the most mundane things, which end up driving their parents insane. Moreover, it is esp. unhelpful when it comes to self-examination, because it is a bottomless hole. The bildungsroman, as it were, will never be complete if “Why” is the guiding question. The untold layers of motivation are too thick, and the narrative will suffer if you (a) try to tell it all or (b) try to tell a part of it. (Those are the only two options, no?) Perhaps a better question, for the sake of our jealous, is “How?” — how does one manage productivity in the face of everything else that life requires of you? amidst the professional and personal frustrations? in the light of Christians who distrust you for speaking about religion irreligiously, and non-Christians who distrust you for speaking about religion at all? With respect to my friends and co-bloggers at AUFS, this, I think, is a far more valuable question.

I bring all this up mostly as an excuse to link to this bit by the comedian Louis C.K., who describes the conversation that ensued after he told his daughter she can’t play outside because it’s raining and she responds by asking “Why?”  Of course, this is not typical AUFS material, but I found additional warrant in the fact that it surprisingly ends up speaking to some of the more Schellingean concerns about nothingness as well.

A Link Post Dedicated to The Meaning of David Cameron

Richard Seymour of the Marxist blog Lenin’s Tomb has just released his second book, The Meaning of David Cameron in the theory series at Zer0 Books (which will eventually include one of Adam’s Awkwardness as well). I haven’t been able to read it yet, but I really like Seymour’s stuff and think he will offer a very interesting analysis of the contemporary British political situation (one should perhaps really say English political situation). If you’re interested in reading more Dominic Fox has posted a positive review of the book that should give you a good sense of its contents and Seymour himself has posted the text of a talk he gave at the book’s launch. Some readers will likely be interested in Seymour’s criticisms of Phillip Blond’s RO Red Toryism.

Mythology, Madness and Laughter – Fichte’s Laughter 3.3-3.4

Žižek continues his discussion of Fichte in this chapter using what feels like a phoned in method: a few clever movie references here (sometimes with the date and sometimes without as if he can’t be bothered to check IMDB), some counter-intuitive thesis about Kant or Fichte here, interpolation of Fichte’s concepts via Lacan’s, etc. I have continued to be disappointed by Žižek’s showing in this book, but I’m going to try to distill out of this mess of references to other thinkers, films, and novels what I take to be the interesting point regarding Ficthe’s use of the concept Anstoß (which Žižek tells us has two primary meanings in German: “check, obstacle, hinderance, something that reists the boundless expansion of our striving, and an impetus, stimulus, something that incites our activity” (142).)

When the dad from Calvin and Hobbes is your professor

This morning in class, one of my students sarcastically asked where dinosaurs fit into the New Testament. Improvising, I said that God actually hadn’t created dinosaurs yet and they were actually only going to be around in the end times. The reason there are fossils is that time is a circle and it’s already looped back around — the future dinosaurs died, then their bones remained in the ground for the loop-around.

This was coming off a class break, so students were kind of still filtering in, and someone asked where I was getting these ideas. I just pointed at my Bible and said, “Have you guys even been READING this stuff?!”

Sadly, one person looked so confused that I had to explicitly say I was kidding.

Blog updates

This week, we have expanded our offerings across the top to include archives of book events and reading notes as well as contributors’ books. In the near future, we hope to fight against the oblivion in which old blog posts tend to languish by adding a “Greatest Hits” page as well, broken down into subcategories (such as Anthony’s ecology posts, Brad’s conference reports, or my tirades about ecclesiology). If you have a favorite post or potential category you’d like to recommend, please let us know in comments.

Vibrant Matter Event Begins

Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error the Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things event has begun with six posts.

• Vibrant Matter: The Overview.
• An Interview with Jane Bennett (the author of Vibrant Matter).
• Preface.
• Chapter 1, Section I.
• Chapter 1, Sections II-V.
• Chapter 1, Section VI.

Mythology, Madness and Laughter – Fichte’s Laughter 3.0-3.2

Another guest post from Jeremy Ridenour provides the opening summary for the final chapter. -APS

Zizek begins this section arguing that we can learn a great deal by trying to think of how philosophers who were overcome by their successors would respond to their successor’s criticism (e.g. how Husserl would reply to Heidegger). These retroactive rejoinders are interesting insofar as “thought rebels against its reduction to a term in the chain of ‘development’ and assert its absolute right or claim” (123). These responses can open up truly new ways of thinking, or as Zizek puts it nicely, “[t]rue revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives” (123).

Specifically, Zizek explores the way Fichte responded to Schelling’s criticism of his early work. Fichte’s response was most manifest in his change of how to think of the ground of reality, namely the asubjective divine Being grounds reality not the self-positing I. For Ficthe, “I is ‘as such’ a split of the Absolute, the ‘minimal difference’ of its self-appearing” (124). However, Zizek criticizes Fichte for not being able to think the way in which the Absolute appears to itself, “i.e., that the subjective reflection of the Absolute is the Absolute’s self-reflection” (124). Ficthe’s self-reflecting I needed to have its foundation in the Absolute. Commenting on Ficthe’s discussion of the Absolute and appearance, Zizek notes that for the Absolute to appear as itself and not simply as another appearance there must a division in the realm of appearances in which “the gap between appearance and true Being must inscribe itself into the very domain of appearing” (125). The potential problem is that the appearance of the Absolute might be mistaken for the Absolute itself. Moreover, Zizek claims that “the illusion is no longer to mistake appearance for being, but to mistake being for appearing: the only ‘being’ of the Absolute is its appearing, and the illusion is that this appearing is a mere ‘image’ behind which there is a transcendent true Being” (126). Zizek uses this as a correction against Fichte who believes the true error is mistaking image for being, and he goes on to argue that we should endorse Derrida’s God as the promise of the to come (i.e. a God that is merely a “pure virtuality of a promise”) (126).