Anatheism

Anatheism
Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231147899

Has the death of God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? This book explores this question and argues how by accepting that we know nothing about God, we can rediscover an absent holiness in our lives and reclaim an everyday divinity.

The Art of Anatheism

The Art of Anatheism
Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2017
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781786605214

This book proposes a way to think and speak about God in and through our contemporary, secular society, bridging the theist/atheist divide by considering the divine through the lens of aesthetics. It represents a timely contribution to Continental philosophy of religion that includes some of the most respected and important voices in the field.

The Art of Anatheism

The Art of Anatheism
Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786605228

Theopoetics names the notion that the divine (theos) manifests itself as creative making (poiesis). Anatheism expresses the attendant claim that this making takes the form of a second creation – re-creation or creation again (ana) – where humanity and divinity collaborate in the coming of the Kingdom. The Art of Anatheism brings together philosophers, theologians, and artists to open up the question of the relationship between artistic creation and the divine. The book asks the question – how can God happen again after the death of God? It answers it by proposing an ‘art of anatheism’ which attends to the recreation and return of the divine through certain forms of literature, painting, liturgy, music, and performance. Engaging students, scholars, and interested readers across a wide range of disciplines – philosophy, theology, aesthetics, literary criticism, poetics – the volume includes contributions from both practising artists and professional academics. As such it brings together examples from ancient religious wisdom traditions and cutting-edge contemporary cultural practices to suggest that the sacred is often most potent and persuasive when recreating the everyday world of our secular experience.

Reimagining the Sacred

Reimagining the Sacred
Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231540884

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love.

Richard Kearney's Anatheistic Wager

Richard Kearney's Anatheistic Wager
Author: Pierre Drouot
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-04-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253034019

Philosopher Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, Richard Kearney has offered a wager of his own—the anatheistic wager, or return to God after the death of God. In this volume, an international group of contributors consider what Kearney's spiritual wager means. They question what is at stake with such a wager and what anatheism demands of the self and of others. The essays explore the dynamics of religious anatheistic performativity, its demarcations and limits, and its motives. A recent interview with Kearney focuses on crucial questions about philosophy, theology, and religious commitment. As a whole, this volume interprets and challenges Kearney's philosophy of religion and its radical impact on contemporary views of God.

An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought

An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought
Author: Stefanos Geroulanos
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804774242

French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.

The God Who May Be

The God Who May Be
Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2001-10-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780253109163

"Kearney is one of the most exciting thinkers in the English-speaking world of continental philosophy.... and [he] joins hands with its fundamental project, asking the question 'what'or who'comes after the God of metaphysics?'" -- John D. Caputo Engaging some of the most urgent issues in the philosophy of religion today, in this lively book Richard Kearney proposes that instead of thinking of God as 'actual,' God might best be thought of as the possibility of the impossible. By pulling away from biblical perceptions of God and breaking with dominant theological traditions, Kearney draws on the work of Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, Heidegger, and others to provide a surprising and original answer to who or what God might be. For Kearney, the intersecting dimensions of impossibility propel religious experience and faith in new directions, notably toward views of God that are unforeseeable, unprogrammable, and uncertain. Important themes such as the phenomenology of the persona, the meaning of the unity of God, God and desire, notions of existence and différance, and faith in philosophy are taken up in this penetrating and original work. Richard Kearney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and University College, Dublin. He is author of many books on modern philosophy and culture, including Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, The Wake of Imagination, and The Poetics of Modernity.

Seven Types of Atheism

Seven Types of Atheism
Author: John Gray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0374714266

From the provocative author of Straw Dogs comes an incisive, surprising intervention in the political and scientific debate over religion and atheism When you explore older atheisms, you will find that some of your firmest convictions—secular or religious—are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought. For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself. Along a spectrum that ranges from the convictions of “God-haters” like the Marquis de Sade to the mysticism of Arthur Schopenhauer, from Bertrand Russell’s search for truth in mathematics to secular political religions like Jacobinism and Nazism, Gray explores the various ways great minds have attempted to understand the questions of salvation, purpose, progress, and evil. The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary light on what it is to be human.

Self-Understanding and Lifeworld

Self-Understanding and Lifeworld
Author: Hans-Helmuth Gander
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2017-08-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253026075

What are the foundations of human self-understanding and the value of responsible philosophical questioning? Focusing on Heidegger's early work on facticity, historicity, and the phenomenological hermeneutics of factical-historical life, Hans-Helmuth Gander develops an idea of understanding that reflects our connection with the world and other, and thus invites deep consideration of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He draws usefully on Husserl's phenomenology and provides grounds for exchange with Descartes, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. On the way to developing a contemporary hermeneutical philosophy, Gander clarifies the human relation to self in and through conversation with Heidegger's early hermeneutics. Questions about reading and writing then follow as these are the very actions that structure human self-understanding and world understanding.

Hermann Cohen and the Crisis of Liberalism

Hermann Cohen and the Crisis of Liberalism
Author: Paul Egan Nahme
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253039762

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) is often held to be one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century. Paul E. Nahme, in this new consideration of Cohen, liberalism, and religion, emphasizes the idea of enchantment, or the faith in and commitment to ideas, reason, and critique—the animating spirits that move society forward. Nahme views Cohen through the lenses of the crises of Imperial Germany—the rise of antisemitism, nationalism, and secularization—to come to a greater understanding of liberalism, its Protestant and Jewish roots, and the spirits of modernity and tradition that form its foundation. Nahme's philosophical and historical retelling of the story of Cohen and his spiritual investment in liberal theology present a strong argument for religious pluralism and public reason in a world rife with populism, identity politics, and conspiracy theories.