AUFS’s published critiques of Radical Orthodoxy: A beginner’s guide

It has come to my attention that we here at AUFS are famous as critics of Radical Orthodoxy, but at the same time, many people believe we have no substantive critique. It is true that many of our posts here are occasional and underdeveloped in nature (i.e., are blog posts), so that one might come away with the idea that we are solely occupied with scoring cheap points. Yet there is a whole world outside the blogosphere, where we have actually published various books and essays! It is in that extra-blogical world that one can find our substantive critiques of Radical Orthodoxy.

A note

I speak only for myself here, but I don’t consider this blog to be my primary academic work. By volume, it doubtless exceeds my published work, but my blogging serves my published work both in terms of providing a forum for me to test out ideas and in terms of increasing my public profile so that my published work can reach a broader audience.

Nothing I write here should be considered my final position. If I don’t seem to substantiate a position in the context of the blog, you should first look to my relevant published writings before drawing any conclusions about the depth of my engagement with the topic.

To take a random example: one could conclude from the blog that I hardly have anything to say about Larry David. Even a thorough search would only reveal a handful of references, and those would be relatively superficial. Yet fully a fourth of my book Awkwardness is dedicated to Larry David and the entire project is inspired by his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anyone who was gossiping about how I fail to really engage with Larry David would, therefore, be intellectually irresponsible. One could presumably extend this principle by analogy to other relevant figures and movements we discuss on this blog.

All of my books are in print and readily available on Amazon or from academic libraries. All but a couple of my articles are readily available for your perusal on my CV page (some must be omitted for copyright reasons but can be found through library databases; you can also e-mail me for a copy). In short: if you want to know what I think about something, you don’t need to rely on your vague impression from my blog posts.

John Milbank on Blogging: Or, some remarks on why insular gasbags don’t like a public free to speak

In many ways AUFS lasting contribution to on-line theological discussions has been to refuse and end the hegemonic reign that Radical Orthodoxy had for many graduate students interested in Continental philosophy and theology. It goes without saying that this hegemony was, of course, mostly found amongst students of Christian theology, many of them post-evangelical and so suffering from a certain piety inescapable for such damaged individuals. I think what many of these students turned to RO because of a deep sense of the wrong state of things present in their own Christian life. Of course RO only presents, as all forms of apologetics, various theodicies and so this perpetuates the split, the wrong state of things, that these students try to heal by parroting the assumed masters, like John Milbank. But by presenting these often meaningless words to students, whose only knowledge of the figures and forms of life being critiqued by RO comes from those claiming to have mastered them, we’ve been able to move the debate simply by demanding one.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing

It’s been a long time since we’ve criticized one of Milbank’s interventions, and his seemingly infinitely long piece on gay marriage may present a good opportunity.

On one point, we agree: “In effect, if marriage is now understood as a lifelong sexual contract between any two adult human persons with no specification of gender, then the allowance of gay marriage renders all marriages ‘gay marriages.’” Yet the conclusion he draws from this is strange, involving an idiosyncratic definition of “clear-thinking”: “Given such a situation, were it not for the space afforded by canon law (namely, the possibility of church marriage) a resort to cohabitation – which has hitherto been understood as ‘common-law marriage’ – would be the only logical path for clear-thinking Christians.”

Fair is fair

Milbank’s response to the London riots is surprisingly good.

New Issue of Political Theology

The newest issue of Political Theology is now available. I bring this to your attention as it contains excellent articles by some of our own — see Brad Johnson’s “Doing Justice to Justice” and Anthony Paul Smith’s “The Judgment of God and the Immeasurable.” Check them out.

My contribution to the Karl Barth Blog Conference

The annual Karl Barth Blog Conference has been underway for the last few weeks, this time around focusing on putting Barth in dialogue with various figures. Paul Dafydd Jones has written on Barth in dialogue with The Monstrosity of Christ, and I wrote a response (appended to his post). I’ve already written a considerable amount on that book, and so I focused on critiquing Barth more than on Zizek or Milbank.

Thanks to the conference organizers for inviting me to be a part of it.

On Milbank: Let’s not and say we did

It has come to my attention that Milbank has weighed in on Stephen Fry’s claim that women don’t enjoy sex. I have read the article, and it seems to me to have a lot of questionable claims in it, of the kind one would expect.

Instead of actually posting about it at length, though, this time around I think I’m just going to summarize the way these things go in general, to save us all valuable time.

Adam: Milbank’s opinion on this matter seems to me to be ill-founded and wrong.
People who agree with Adam: I agree, and I’d like to point out a couple extra things you didn’t address.
People who are on the fence: I don’t know — I certainly don’t agree with everything the guy says, but he makes some good points.
Adam: What are those good points?
People who are on the fence: Well, if you remove this remark from its context and completely reinterpret it in the most sympathetic possible way, it seems to be arguably non-bad.
Adam: But that approach doesn’t really make sense — and even if we follow it, the end result is still not great.
People who are on the fence: Okay, fine, we’re just uncomfortable with the fact that you’re too negative. Add some nuance! Stop being so one-sided all the time!

Does anyone have anything they’d like to add?

Roundtable on The Monstrosity of Christ

The Villanova University online journal Expositions has a new issue out, including a “roundtable discussion” of Zizek and Milbank’s Monstrosity of Christ. Surprisingly, I have a contribution (PDF), and since I’ve already written so much on the book, I used this as an opportunity to reflect on its overall structure and impact. Ultimately, as my title indicates, I regard the volume as a missed encounter and a missed opportunity. Other roundtable participants include Clayton Crockett, Jeff Robbins, and Frederiek Depoortere.

When I hear the word “radical center,” I reach for my gun

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if someone is trying to sell you a solution that purports to be “beyond Left and Right” and is anything other than plain old liberalism, what they’re trying to sell is fascism. Indeed, I eagerly await the Milbank article that will lament the fact that the laudable legacy of Italian fascism has been tarred through its unfortunate association with Nazism. (His dissociation of Schmitt from the authentic Catholic political tradition is a nice step down this path already, though.)

Another highlight of this article is its strange emphasis on Methodism. Excluded from the good kinds of Christianity, though not explicitly mentioned: Lutheran and Reformed traditions, presumably because of their voluntarist (i.e., nihilist) foundations. Weirdly, though, Islam, which is surely the ultimate in voluntarism in Milbank’s mind, gets a couple positive references — continuing the pattern of opportunism in his recent articles, where he’ll happily take up an alliance with, for example, Enlightenment values when it serves his immediate rhetorical purposes.

In addition, his desire to reform the House of Lords, presumably to make it more aristocratic, might help him to find an audience in Tea Party circles, where it’s become something of a trend to try to roll back the popular election of senators and go back to an appointment system. I could also definitely see the “Big Society” idea catching on among Tea Partiers, above all because it sounds really principled but doesn’t come anywhere close to representing an actual political program.