Podcast with Daniel Bell on Capitalism and Desire
(Due to a scheduling error, this is just posting today, but it should have posted on Thursday. Our apologies.) Last November saw the release of the excellent and illuminating (and convicting) book by Daniel Bell Jr.,–the latest in the Church and Postmodern Culture Series–The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World. Bell’s book features... Read More
Posing Foolish Questions: What Is Literature?
A Review of Jacques Rancière’s Mute Speech Jerilyn Sambrooke “There are some questions we dare no longer pose.” Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech Jacques Rancière’s bold challenge opens Mute Speech (1998), one of his most rigorous works on aesthetics, only just recently published in English (2011). In this opening claim, Rancière echoes the famous, elusive question... Read More
New Book – Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion
Given the invigorating discussions that occur on this blog about the intersection of religion and postmodernism, I wanted to just note the publication of a new book that Stephen Minister and I have edited that is likely to be of interest to “Church and Postmodernism” readers. It is entitled, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with... Read More
“Inverting” the Apocalypse – Žižek, Gunjević, and Other Ways of Living Through the End Times
Lately I’ve been reading God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (Seven Stories Press, 2012), not so much a dialogue but an series of interlinear monologues between Continental philosophy’s enfant terrible Slavoy Žižek and Croatian radical orthodox theologian Boris Gunjević . The title is slightly misleading, if only because without knowing what... Read More
Response to Downing: Police at Play
Mea culpa. How else could I respond to Crystal Downing’s gracious, rightly-critical engagement with The Fall of Interpretation? In what was a moment of (rather Caputo-an?[1]) flourish, I seem to have blamed an entire discipline for mis-readings of Derrida. And this despite the fact that, as Downing rightly points out, there are plenty of professors of philosophy and religious... Read More
The Ghost in The Fall
Unlike Jacques Derrida, who was haunted by specters of Karl Marx, I am haunted by specters of JKA Smith. My first glimpse of Smith’s ghostly presence came in 2005, when an anonymous reader for my soon-to-be published book on postmodernism berated me for never mentioning The Fall of Interpretation. As I checked Smith’s text out of my college library, planning to include it in... Read More
Response to DeRoo: Whose Church? Which Ecclesiology?
I love it that each of my interlocutors has homed in on quite different themes and issues in The Fall of Interpretation. And as you’ll have guessed, it’s a special treat to engage Neal, one of my star students about whom I regularly brag, taking way more credit than I deserve. (We also both share a common teacher, Jim Olthuis, whose fingerprints are all over The Fall of... Read More
“I am the Church, you are the Church, we are the Church together…”
I first read The Fall of Interpretation (FoI) in the Fall of 2002. I had learned shortly before the semester had begun that the Philosophy of Language class I had signed up for was going to be taught by a new prof, some young guy who looked like he belonged in an Old Navy catalogue rather than in the Ivory Tower (when all you’ve got to go by is a headshot on the department homepage,... Read More
Response to Bowald: Sins of Omission
I’m profoundly grateful to these scholars for taking time to carefully, critically, and charitably engage the second edition of The Fall of Interpretation—and in the summer, of all things! This kind of constructive engagement is a real gift to an author, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to continue the conversation by replying to each. As I’ve come to expect, Mark... Read More
The Redemption of Interpretation: An Interlocution on Sin and Hermeneutics
What is “interpretation”? James K. A. Smith has issued a second edition of his first book on its “fall.” Clarifying what exactly interpretation is for Smith is a priority for those who might benefit from reading it, and his later work. We can clearly identify two dimensions to interpretation: first, the ontological conditions for interpretation and, second, the act... Read More
