A friend brought a debate between Miroslav Volf and Daniel Bell to my attention this week. Having read through the respective comments they both put forward in volume 19 of Modern Theology, I thought I would post my comment here as well. This is not a detailed point by point account, but more a meta comment about what I perceive to be the nature of the debate.

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In the recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion issue 76 volume 3, Jeffrey Stout's 2007 Plenary Address on the "Folly of Secularism" has been published. Here Stout provides a helpful response and engagement with the accounts of radical secularism which can be found in Richard Rorty and Sam Harris. It's an insightful investigation into the problems which arise when either secularist or theocratic utopias are thought through, while nonetheless projecting a vision of democracy that goes beyond them both. It's well worth reading and can be found here: http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/76/3/533?rss=1. Here's an excerpt to get you started:

Many people who care about democratic practices and institutions are worried by the power of the religious right in the United States and the rise of militant Islam elsewhere. They fear that democracy will give way to theocracy if these forces triumph,and they want to know how to prevent this from happening. One increasingly popular answer to this question is secularist. It says that striving to minimize the influence of religion on politics is essential to the defense of democracy. My purpose in this essay is to raise doubts about the wisdom of this answer.

And, after citing the fall of apartheid in South Africa and communism in Poland, Stout goes on:

What these examples suggest, it seems to me, is that democratic reform may indeed be achievable by democratic means in places where the majority of the citizens are religiously active if citizens are prepared to build coalitions of the right sort. If major reform is going to happen again in the United States, it will probably happen in roughly the same way that it has happened before. It will not happen because of secularism, but in spite of it. And it had better happen, because if it does not, our political life will cease to be democratic in anything but name.

Updated on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 10:34AM by Timothy Stanley

There is a profound need today to  re-investigate religion's relationship to a public political sphere of authority. Whether it's the media row over Rowan Williams' suggestion that Sharia law might play a part in the British legal system, or when a woman working at a public marriage registrars office is allowed to abstain from granting marriage licenses to gay couples, we are constantly made aware of the need to continue to think through the role of religion in the public sphere today.  In this sense, institutions like the church must continue to reflect upon their relation to institutions like the state.  What's interesting about this suggestion is that it often uncovers the manner in which both sets of institutions are inherently political and both institutions cohere according to a set of cultural values and beliefs. The social theories best suited to investigate political authority structures, therefore, often go beyond the standard political science emphasis on institutions themselves in order to uncover the cultural conditions and dispositions which animate them and justify their existence.

Could it be that the public political sphere depends upon values which it cannot provide in and of itself?  Can religious communities like Christian churches foster social solidarity in a western culture that is increasingly "bowling alone?" These questions are raised most acutely in the work of Juergen Habermas. In the coming months I have an essay on Barth and Habermas coming out in Political Theology, and recently gave a presentation on Habermas to some colleagues here at the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at The University of Manchester.I wanted to take a moment to explain a little about this essay and respond to a common question regarding Habermas's response to religious violence.

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I have been thinking about the recurring nature of the question "What is metaphysics?" in Heidegger's thought for the past few weeks. Found this image to go with Heidegger's essay, "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics." Here, he develops an analogy between philosophy and a tree, arguing that the tree trunk and branches, or all we see, is what the sciences explore. Greek metaphysics inquired into the roots. But what of the ground the roots grow within? In asking about the ground of those roots Heidegger calls for a kind of Metaphysics of metaphysics, or Ontology of ontology? Heidegger's Metaphysics are puncuated with a question mark because by the end of his philosophy in essays like "Time and Being," he talks about leaving Metaphysics to itself in favor of another path to thinking (Denkweg) altogether.

What is meant by this other kind of post-ontological thinking remains difficult to understand. For instance, in "The Question of Being" Heidegger crosses being out in order to remind th reader not to objectify being. Rather Heidegger wants to inquire into the event of being as it gives existence to beings, i.e. human beings. Derrida, in his "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," comments on this crossing out of being in Heidegger's thought and suggests that Heidegger did not go far enough in his attempt to leave ontological thought behind. Being remains under the sign of the cross, still haunting his philosophy. Derrida's alternative is what he sometimes refers to as a "khora" or a more radical nothing point out of which language and thought might arise.

My considerations as of late concern the logic of Heidegger's thought and the manner of the end of metaphysics which he described. In his essay "The End of Philosophy and the New Task of Thinking," he makes it clear that the end of which he speaks is a completion of metaphysics. In this sense, metaphysics must be fulfilled not abandoned or be completely banished from our thinking. In the end, it is still human beings who are thinking and inquiring into the manner in which being gives us our existence. As such, being must remain under the sign of a cross if only to remind us that although our inquiry must go further than being by looking into the event which arises out of the relation between being and beings, it is nonetheless this event which is under discussion. My contention with Heidegger, like Derrida, is also with the adequacy of the cross which covers being. Unlike Derrida however, I consider the cross to be a necessity insofar as Heidegger's reflections upon the transcendent event of being remained, ultimately, incarnational. That is to say, could it be that a more adequate crossing out of being might allow us to see the event all the more clearly? Could it be that it is precisely here that the early Protestant investigations of Heidegger return him us to Luther's theologia crucis?

Whenever the term religion is mentioned today, a tension can be felt. On the one hand, there is this list of religions which get propogated every time the word is mentioned, e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism etc. On the other hand, there is this subtle sense that the term and this list are quite distanced from concrete religious practices as they are enacted in particular cultural contexts. What makes religion real? Why does anyone do it?

The Darjeeling Limited is probably one of the best cinema examples of deconstructing religion as of late.  The film follows a trio of brothers played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman on a "spiritual" journey across India. They seek out the Hindu hot spots in an attempt to come to peace, tranquility, and that oh so elusive transcendental state.

Like all Wes Anderson films we are taken into the inner world of their family through carefully written and idiosyncratic dialogue. We begin to feel their utter desperation in the face of their father's death, and lives which have left them numb. The brothers' abnormal quirkiness is accentuated as they literally carry their father's baggage with them around India searching the shallows of their idea of religion - an idea, I would suggest, which is deeply rooted in the dead end consumerism which sees it as what comes next, after, and beyond the "ultra" they were sold five years ago.

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This week my tutorial finished out its year of inquiring into the study of religions and theology. This was essentially a course on methods, i.e. the value of sociological, psychological, textual, anthropological, and phenomenological approaches to the study of religion. As there is a final exam, I decided to turn the final seminar into a overview lecture to try and give the students a bird's eye perspective on what we've done this year. Here's a link to the PowerPoint presentation I used, as well as the pdf handout.

About a year ago, I purchased the prepublication of the digital version of Barth's Church Dogmatics which was being published by Logos. Purchasing prepublications gets you a deal, but also a lot of gutwrenching web twitching as you check to see when it is going to be finished. I hoped I would receive it before I finished my dissertation, but as the months stretched on I began to wonder. I called the helpdesk but no one could tell me when it was going to ship. I found a blog on the Logos homepage talking about upcoming publications. All I could find out was that it was in prodcution. I imagine they probably had a number of people hounding them. Silence can be the best expectations management strategy I suppose. Then a random email came a few weeks ago, "This is to inform you that your recent Pre-Pub order of Barth's Church Dogmatics (14 volumes) is now preparing to ship." I thought, I'll bet you anything it will arrive the day of my viva at the virtual end of my dissertation. Sure enough, I got home today, opened the mailbox, and what to my wondering eyes should appear? But one tiny cd with 14 volumes of Barth's theology on it. If Barth is watching down from heaven, I imagine he's smiling.

In any case, they are very snazzy and, unlike the paper edition, there's no need to hire a sherpa when checking them out of the library.