James K. A. Smith

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 […]

Crystal Downing

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 […]

Neal DeRoo

“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 […]

Tripp York

God is a pain, or is in pain, or is pained . . . I don’t know

First of all, be sure to support the good people at Englewood Review of Books. It’s a great magazine/journal, and you should be all in the ‘in’ with them. Subscribe to their print magazine. Now, please. With their kind permission, they are allowing me to re-print my review of Zizek and Gunjevic’s new book, God […]

Chad Lakies

What Facebook Makes Us

In an interview toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault pointed out that for all the interest in power that his work had generated, he was really more interested in the subject and what effects various forces of power had in terms of creating certain kinds of subjectivities. Those of us who work within […]

Joshua Busman

James Blake and Marks of Specters

The idea of “deconstruction” has achieved a somewhat surprising ubiquity in our current culture. In addition to relatively long-standing applications in literary and cultural criticism, deconstruction has also found a home in political punditry and haute cuisine (what does it mean to “deconstruct” a meatloaf anyway?). But perhaps most enamored with the idea of deconstruction […]

Chad Lakies

RESOURCE: Jamie Smith on A/Theism

A/Theism is an interesting move within the conversation about postmodern theology and the church. An effort by some to overcome onto-theological concerns, you can find it in the writings of the emerging church leader Peter Rollins and in the academic work of John D. Caputo — to name only a couple of thinkers familiar to […]

Chad Lakies

Resource: Derrida and Theology

From time to time, one of the new things we’ll try to do here at churchandpomo is offer resources to you hungry readers. As a practitioner and academic, I’ve found it helpful to delve into the vast virtual realm of the interwebs to mine them for whatever interesting tidbits I might find on continental thought, […]