Paper Abstracts

Sharon Betcher, Vancouver School of Theology
"'Take My 'Yoga' Upon You' (Matt 11:29):  A Spirit/ual Pli/é for the Global City"

The concept [S]pirit--first constructively formulated among dislocated persons in an imperially stewed, multi-religious milieu (Eliade)--returns here as the fold or "pli" of postcolonial cosmopolitan religious multiplicity.  Thinking with and through disability experience (as itself a yoke or harness for spiritual practice) and comparative theological conversation might, I am hoping, occasion the redeployment of [S]pirit as a "yoga" or "yoke" (the words share the same Sanskrit root) of generosity so as to address the raw aches of our precarious existence to which the urban disposition of the planet now exposes us.  Working the cosmotheology of the hidden God (Nicolaus of Cusa, Martin Luther, Simone Weil) through the Deleuzean multiple and then putting this "Spirit" in dialog with the corporeal philosophy of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero and Rosalyn Diprose, this paper develops the yoke/yoga--the spiritual prosthesis--of corporeal generosity to creature need within the inter-religious milieu of today's global cities.

Virginia Burrus, Drew University Theological School
"Nothing Is Not One: Revisiting the Ex Nihilo"

Franz Rosenzweig's concept of nothingness is strongly inflected by his complex theory of time and eternity and profoundly implicated in his (perhaps doomed) attempt to assert the inherent multiplicity and relationality of all by defending the irreducibility and mutual entanglement of God, world, and human, respectively.  Joined in an ambivalent embrace with medieval mystical traditions for which the ex nihilo conjoins a negative cosmology and anthropology to a negative theology, Rosenzweig's thought here also opens a path back to the ex nihilo teachings of late antiquity, exemplified by Athanasius and Genesis Rabbah.  Approached from a new angle, the classical doctrine of creation from nothing may bespeak not mastery but mystery, not power but fragility, not separation but intimate relatedness.

Monica A. Coleman, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University
"Invoking Oya: Practicing a Polydox Soteriology through a Postmodern Womanist Reading of Tananarive Due's The Living Blood"

I offer a postmodern womanist reading of Tananarive Due's science fiction novel, The Living Blood.  I have previously argued that black women's science fiction can serve as a source for postmodern womanist theological reflection.  Postmodern womanist theological reflection also attends to the presence and role of ancestors, especially as they signify African traditional religions and the syncretic practices of African American religions. Postmodern womanist theology's ability to work with Christianity and communotheistic traditions while searching for contextually-specific modes of creative transformation lends itself to polydoxic practices that highlight multiplicity, relationality, value and mystery.

The Living Blood (2000) tells the story of an African immortal, Dawit who confers his immortality onto his pregnant wife, Jessica.   Having been born with the blood (as compared to receiving it as an adult), their daughter, Fana, possesses powers that greatly surpass that of any of the other 59 African immortals.  As Fana grows, Jessica and her physician sister run a rural clinic in Botswana using the blood to heal sick children. This activity splinters the existing community of African immortals who do not share the blood.  In a converging story line, a Florida physician searches for the sisters in order to bring back the blood for his leukemia-stricken son. Unfortunately, another man hires mercenaries to find the blood so that he can use it for his own personal and economic gain.  The story is resolved in the midst of a hurricane that Fana unwittingly causes.  Jessica and Dawit must reunite to learn how to raise their daughter and rescue her from the destructive storm she is spinning.  A glimpse into the future shows a small community of mortals and immortals living on a secluded farm where they gather their blood to help heal the world of disease.  

A postmodern womanist reading of The Living Blood names divinity in the manifestations of the Yoruba òrìşà Oya and in the depiction of the living blood. I identify a Cuban understanding of Oya as operative in Due's depiction of the powerful hurricane spun by a beautiful female.  Likewise, the living blood has the same characteristics as the Yoruba concept of àşę–divine connection, transferable, morally neutral power.  The story of the blood's acquisition reproduces the religious encounter of enslaved Africans and Catholic missionaries.  Finally, we see black women as Saviors who use the blood to heal and start a community of healers. This reading suggests a polydox soteriology: a route to health (salve) and wholeness through the intersections of multiple religious traditions, multiple divine forces, multiple incarnations and multiple Saviors.  Such a reading also suggests that polydox soteriology is transnational, transcontinental, postcolonial, feminist, womanish, inherently dangerous yet also necessary for our health.

 

Roland Faber, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University
"The Sense of Peace: A Para-Doxology of Divine Multiplicity"

According to a qualified "opinion," the alpha and omega of theology is doxology, the functionless exhilaration of divine doxa for its one sake. In Luke 2:4, the doxological invocation of divine doxa is immanently her shining over the ones who live in peace. If divine doxa is about peace, in what sense can invoking the divine be an evocation of peace? Isn't religion, as Alfred N. Whitehead says, the last resort of savagery? Isn't it with deep disgust that we must react to the fact that "in the name of God" is equivalent with any number reasons for war?

Like a paranoid disorder, religious "opinion" (doxa) tends to find itself to be absolutely true, a shadows of the doxa of God--not only a shadow but the only true shadow, sanctifying one's own horizon as that of the one, absolute God himself: doxology as orthodoxy. If the only means of "peace in heaven" becomes orthodox heteronomy, the only equivalent of the doxa of God becomes "war on earth." How can God-talk be "saved" from war--"in heaven" and "on earth"? Could, maybe, resisting the ortho-doxa of the one, true measure "in heaven" evoke the para-doxa of "peace on earth"?

In exploring the paradoxical doxology of divine multiplicity that cannot be unified and in no synthesis exhibits a presupposed unity, we might become able to refrain from colonizing unifications, always resulting in the oppressive exclusiveness of orthodoxy, by also withholding counter-defined regimes of "heterodoxy" and "heresy." Accounts of the divine para-doxa must transgress expressions of legitimized power into that of a pure love of multiplicity--polyphilia. In meandering through folds of philosophical and theological accounts of divine para-doxa (George Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Alfred N. Whitehead), this "para-doxology" of polyphilia will seek "the sense of peace" in a divine "polymony" (polyphonic harmony) of its folds.

 

 

Marion Grau, Graduate Theological Union, Church Divinity School of the Pacific
"'Don't Mess with the Missionary Clan': The Colensos and the Zulu between Monotheism, Syncretism, and Polydoxy"

Using a brief case study as departure, this paper will explore the ways in which missionary encounters have challenged ideas of monotheism, syncretism, pluralism, multiple religious practices and belongings. As denizens of the liminal spaces between theologies, economies, and cultures, missionaries occupy a complex space within the colonial logic and within theological discourse. Observing missionary-colonial-native dynamics and controversies in 19th century colonial Natal via on a father and daughter team, the Bishop of Natal John William Colenso and his daughter the missionary Harriette Colenso, this paper will explore the disciplining of spirit and body in the colonial mission and its implications for today.

The trial of Bishop Colenso shook the foundations of the colonial Anglican Church, raising issues that are still vital today. Their struggles around biblical authority and hermeneutics, the relationship between gospel and culture, multiple religious and social practices, and competing gender, racial, family politics and socio-economics can inform our own debates around the future of global Christianities.

Controversial views on mission and culture, gender relations and masculinity, and authoritarian racial politics of the white settler culture were debated in the heresy trial against Colenso at the first Lambeth conference and that became the rationale for his excommunication are issues that can inform and transform a missiology in a resolute third space between the absolutes of supersessionism and dissolutions of relativism.

Catherine Keller, Drew University Theological School
"Folds of Polydoxy: Multiplicity, Relation, Negation"

"But a creature, because it needs the help of its fellow creatures, must be multiple in order to receive this help."   (Anne Conway) 
 
If multiplicity, unlike bare plurality, signifies the many folds of relation, that manifold will in turn embody the values by which polydoxy will distinguish itself from bare pluralism.  At once nurturant and apophatic, such a theology grows amidst the uncertainties of an entangled and endangered world. This paper wants help from the seventeenth-century kabbalistic Quaker Conway, in conjunction with the pluralism of William Connolly, a current Jamesian-Deleuzian political theorist, to articulate a cosmopolitics of multiplicity.

Hyo-Dong Lee, Drew University Theological School
"'Empty and Tranquil, and Without Any Sign, and Yet All Things Are Luxuriantly Present in It': A Comparative-Theological Reflection on the Neo-Confucian Conception of the Manifold Spirit of the Taegeuk/Taiji"

It is a widely recognized fact that most if not all Neo-Confucian thinkers appeal to the analytic dyad of principle (li) and psychophysical energy (gi/qi) to describe their holistic view of the moral and ethical experiences of humanity on the one hand and the ontological and cosmological realities undergirding those experiences on the other.  The Neo-Confucians employ the paradigm of the unity of principle and psychophysical energy, represented by the symbol of the Great Ultimate (taegeuk/taiji), to articulate their nondualistic understanding of the relationship between one and many, transcendence and immanence, spirit and nature, and mind and body.  In this paper I will examine the famous Neo-Confucian dictum which encapsulates the aforementioned unity--"Empty and Tranquil, and Without Any Sign, and Yet All Things Are Luxuriantly Present in It"--in order to explore the possibilities of a post-monotheistic Christian pneumatology.  I will focus in particular on the various ways in which the Neo-Confucian thinkers Zhu Xi, Yi Hwang, and Yim Seong-ju expound the dictum to demonstrate, each in his own fashion, how one is many and many are one, leading to a "nondualistic dualism" of li and gi, a more radical dualism of li and gi, and a monism of gi, respectively, and the corresponding views of moral psychology and anthropology.  By engaging in this exercise, I hope to show that an affirmation of spiritual transcendence need not come with an asymmetrical valorization of unicity over multiplicity, and that Christian theology, long held captive by a monotheism cast in the mold of the domination of many by one, can be helped along its way toward liberation by a debate within another tradition of thought.

Mayra Rivera, Graduate Theological Union, Pacific School of Religion
"Glory: The First Passion of Theology"

Doxa, the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew kabôd and the New Testament term for glory, brings into semantic proximity a plurality of concepts related to knowledge and the experiences of awe and wonder. The complex relationship between the various senses of the term doxa lures this exploration of the methodological significance of glory for a theology of the manifold. What if we understood theology as a perpetual movement propelled not by propositional certainty, but rather by the affect of wonder?

The experience of wonder in the encounter with the glory of God is represented in the Hebrew Scriptures not only as extraordinary phenomena, but more often as the transfiguration of the ordinary: as fire or thick darkness, as the brightness of the heavens or of Moses' illuminated face. Glory appears as a luring quality that incites wonder and yet remains beyond our direct access or grasp. Glory is not a thing. Like light, it can only be in that which it illuminates. Indeed, matter and flesh make possible the manifestation of glory, while simultaneously revealing the irreducible mystery of carnality. Thus glory is never one, nor is it a separate element. Furthermore, glory can only be conceived in relation to its effects on those who recognize it, who behold a transfiguration of the ordinary, those who open themselves in wonder.

This essay engages the biblical concept of glory as a theological supplement for the philosophies of wonder (carefully mapped by Mary-Jane Rubenstein), seeking to recover glory's worldliness and its role as the "first passion" (Descartes) of theology.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University
"Undone By Each Other: Interrupted Sovereignty in Augustine's Confessions"

It has become more or less axiomatic to say that the sovereign God of Christian orthodoxy is mirrored by the purportedly autonomous human subject, and that both find early consolidation in the work of St. Augustine. Indeed, Augustine's struggle throughout the Confessions to give an account of himself is coextensive with his effort to hammer out a doctrine of God. Just as Augustine seeks spiritually to progress from division to unification, from things temporal to things eternal, and from the worldly "many" to the divine "One," he tries theologically to solidify God as perfectly unified, unchanging, and simple. The security of these twin figures can be said to rest upon Augustine's efforts to discipline the unruly forces of mourning and desire. Rather than abolish these forces, Augustine endeavors systematically to channel them without remainder into the immutable Godhead, who becomes the guarantor of Augustine's fragile sovereignty. This paper will explore (and perhaps exploit) this fragility in conversation with the recent work of Judith Butler. Focusing on the figures of mourning and desire that both constitute and undo him, it will track the multiplicities that constitute and interrupt Augustine's account of selfhood--and the divinity at its inscrutable core.

Laurel C. Schneider, Chicago Theological Seminary
"Crib Notes From Bethlehem: Polydoxy, Incarnation, and the Necessity of Syncretism"

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has written a poem entitled "Crib" in which she traces the etymology of the word to its Greek origin, meaning woven or plaited from which basket emerges.  From this, the verb crib comes to mean filch ("under cover of wicker anything--some liquor, a cutlet"). 1  It is a short poem, but manages to move, in a few punchy lines, from this complex intercourse of weaving and thieving to the cribbed "object or answer" of that baby in a crib qua manger in Bethlehem.  I intend to use this poem, along with Thomas King's The Truth About Stories,2 as starting points, or muses, for thinking about polydoxy as a mode of constructing doctrine.  Like basket weaving, the polydox theologian pulls multiple strands into a tensive and practical strength for carrying (off?) the complex story of incarnation.  This essay therefore thinks through "polydoxy" as a viable (and dare I claim necessary?) methodological answer to what I have called the problematic Logic of the One in Christian monotheism, and therefore as a prolegomenon to a Christian doctrine of Incarnation that not only takes actual bodies seriously but that takes the syncretic history of doctrine and faith seriously as well.   In the beginning is relation, as Buber, Heyward, and Keller, and many others have argued.  Divine incarnation is nothing if not relation...mixture...a non-collapsing world-shaping story of syncretion.  This means that mixture, a fundamental promiscuity, founds the claims of Christian faith.  On the one hand, I intend for this essay to contribute to our dialogue about the mode of constructing theology that distinguishes our work, and to contribute to my larger project underway, currently entitled Promiscuous Incarnation.

1. Kay Ryan, "Crib" in Elephant Rocks: Poems By Kay Ryan (NY: Grove Press, 1996) 16-17.

2. Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn Press, 2004)

 

John J. Thatamanil, Vanderbilt Divinity School
"How Many Ultimate Realities Are There? Religious Diversity and the Trinity"

Any genuinely polydoxic thinking--a thinking that celebrates the manifold--must be able to give a positive account of religious diversity, that is to say, an account of religious diversity takes it to be an intrinsic good rather than unfortunate happenstance. Needless to say, this has not been a forte of Christian theology. Although Christian theologians have found a variety of resources to celebrate natural and ecological diversity, such theological generosity has not been extended to the religions. Over the last two decades, a variety of Christian theologians have turned to the Trinity as a resource for affirming religious diversity. Their basic claim is that the Trinity is the Christian way of accounting for religious diversity because a Trinitarian God will necessarily be encountered in a variety of ways. This theological move is a genuine advance in a distinctively Christian affirmation of the religious manifold. However, many of these theological appeals to Trinity reduce to new forms of hierarchical inclusivism: whereas other traditions are oriented to some single and particular mode of encounter with divinity, only Christianity can--by appeal to the Trinity--show how these diverse modes of encounter can be held together within the divine life. Once again, Christianity becomes the organizing and sublating one for the religious many. As an alternative to such newfangled forms of supersessionism, some thinkers like David Ray Griffin have proposed that there are multiple religious ultimates. This approximation to polydoxic thought suggests that the different religious traditions are unique, genuinely different, but nonetheless valid because they are oriented to real but different ultimates. In a rejection of both of these options, I argue for a version of trinitarianism that allows for genuine diversity within the divine life but refuses to claim that Christian accounts of the Trinity provide a totalizing, comprehensive and organizing rubric under which the claims of other traditions can be subsumed. Just what it means to say that God is Trinity is unclear apart from a genuine engagement with and learning from other religious traditions. I argue for a threefold of God as ground, contingency and relation. Although each of these terms can be correlated with terms from within traditional Christian discourse--ground with Father, contingency with Son, and relation with Spirit--I argue that the meaning of these dimensions of the divine life can only be gathered by way of theological reflection that draws from the resources of multiple religious traditions. Such theological reflection goes by the name of comparative theology. In a comparative theological exercise that draws on Hindu Advaita to learn about God as ground, from Christian theological sources to learn about God as contingency, and Buddhist traditions to learn about God as relation, I show how religious diversity is an intrinsic and necessary good for any genuinely polydoxic theology.

Student Presenters

Brianne Donaldson, Claremont Graduate University
"They'll Know We Are Process Thinkers By Our... : Finding the Ecological Ethic of Whitehead Through the Lens of Jainism and Ecofeminist Care"

Jainism, Ecofeminist Philosophy and Process Thought are considered or consider themselves to be uniquely ethical systems.  For the Jains this is expressed minimally in a commitment to vegetarianism, charity, service and the avoidance of waste.  Ecofeminist philosophers in the West, who draw connections between the unjustified domination of women, animals, nature and the poor, participate in myriad ethical expressions, some of which include vegetarianism, political and economic solidarity in voting and purchasing, and offering correctives to the symbolic, literary and linguistic arenas that preserve domination hierarchies. 

But how does Whitehead's Process system find expression?  Are there any actions or ethical mandates--similar to those of the Jains or Ecofeminist tradition--that identify one as a Whiteheadian?  As a Process-inspired thinker and/or theologian? 

Though some feminists warn against the authoritarian nature of metaphysics, opting instead for an ethical voice that emerges from relationship,1  Whitehead's system of process-relationality offers an METAphysics (one could say an 'orthodoxy') that is expressed as a polydoxy; a singularity expressed in a multiple reality. Though many-sided-relationalities inform the ethics of Jainism and Ecofeminist inquiry, it is not clear what concrete ethical expressions might look like for those influenced by Whitehead's system. 

However, an analysis of Whitehead's work on subjective experience, novelty and open-ended telos offers compatibility with ecofeminist concerns over genuine empathetic relations and embodied care toward beings as individuals and co-members of a community.2 Furthermore, by examining the Jain doctrines of relativity alongside Whitehead's description of misplaced concreteness and mutual immanence, in the work of Jeffrey Long3 and Roland Faber4, we find a process view of reality that not only satisfies two primary ecofeminist critiques of metaphysical systems, represented in part by Catherine Keller, Marti Kheel and Mayra Rivera5 -- universalization and transcendence -- but also one that reveals an ethical synthesis between an ecofeminist ethos and the Jain practice of ahimsa.

Though Whitehead did not focus explicitly on ethics, remaining consistent with the relativity of misplaced concreteness and the dialectic relationality of mutual immanence does shape action in a particular way.   The extension of ahimsa, as nonviolent expression of metaphysics in action, to Whitehead's process paradigm might be utilized to craft an ecological ethic similar to an ecofeminist ethos or "way of life" marked by the positive injunction toward non-violation6 and contextualized responsiveness.           

This injunction toward non-violation and responsiveness has concrete expression in both Jainism and ecofeminist theory and the practice of embodied care.  Likewise, a similar process ecological ethic invites conversation of what embodied expression of Whiteheadian metaphysics might look like in contemporary Western contexts.  Taking seriously what Whitehead called "the unfading importance of our immediate actions"7 is an essential next- step for those who locate themselves within our ecological process of becoming.

1 Marti Kheel, Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008) 184

2 Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective On What It Is and Why It Matters (Landam: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000).

3 Jeffery Long, "Plurality and Relativity: Whitehead Jainism and the Reconstruction of Religious Pluralism (University of Chicago Dissertation, June 2000).

4 Roland Faber, "Immanence and Incompleteness: Whitehead's Late Metaphysics," presentation at conference Beyond Metaphysics? Transcontinental Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead's Late Thought, (Claremont CA, December 4-6, 2008)

5 Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

6 Catherine Keller, "The Mystery of the Insoluble Evil: Violence and Evil in Marjorie Suchocki," World Without End (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns Publishing, 2005) 52.

7 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1978) 351. 

Rose Ellen Dunn, Drew University Theological School
"(En)folding Divinity: Chiasmic Intertwinings"

"I am [...] a hollow, a fold, which has been made and which can be unmade."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

"[T]he idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of."  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible.

As our perceptive senses open into the world, we are immediately swept into a circle of the visible and the invisible, of the touched and the touching, so that the visible and the touched are subtended by our own seeing and touching.  Our perception crosses the perceived and becomes intertwined with it, one in the other.  Here, Merleau-Ponty observes, "there is a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, and [...] at the point where the two metamorphoses cross what we call perception is born."1  The visible and the sensible beckon perception and, once perceived, infuse the perceiver with sensation.  The one seeing unveils the visible at the same time as the visible takes hold of the one who sees; the one who touches uncovers the sensible at the same time as the sensible takes hold of the hand that touches. 

For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a chiasmic intertwining of perceiver and perceived: "The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place."2  Through perception, we offer ourselves to the sensible and the sensible offers itself to us: "As I contemplate the blue of the sky [...] I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it 'thinks itself within me', I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue."3    

The continual process of intertwining, or (en)folding, transforms the human subject in multiple ways.  "With the first vision, the first contact, the first pleasure, there is initiation," Merleau-Ponty observes, "not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated."4  Phenomenology, open to the full texture of lived experience, "accompanies" this (en)folding by describing the experience of, as well as the openness to, the chiasmic intertwining of the embodied subject in the world.5  It is the task of phenomenology to fold this (en)folding into language.  For Merleau-Ponty, "philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, [...] and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being."6  A theopoetic language of (en)folding itself unfolds in multiple descriptions--in a multiplicity of sacred unfoldings--where, as Robert Corrington suggests, "Sacred meaning has its culminating impulse in ecstatic bliss [which] rests in the eternal stillness within the periodic movement of unfolding/enfolding."7

The chiasmic intertwining of visible and invisible also inspires the apophatic language of mystical theology.  When Meister Eckhart suggests that the self must be enclosed in God, or that God engenders Godself in the self, he is acknowledging a reversibility in the relationship between the self and the divine.8  Following Eckhart, we might suggest that the self, enfolded within divinity, enfolds divinity within itself.  It is at the point of this chiasmic intertwining of the self and the divine that a type of theological language emerges--a language that resists doxic certainty and embraces a theopoetics of the manifold.

Catherine Keller suggests that, "The unfolding of God in the world, and the enfolding of the world in God, is not only mirrored in the mutual participation of all creatures in all creatures, but actively enacted. We creatures fold in and out of each other moment by moment."9  The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers an example of (en)folding through sensible perception--it is through our participation in the chiasmic intertwining of perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, that we "fold in and out of each other."  This essay will explore a theopoetics of (en)folding through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger.  The chiasmic intertwining of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology will be interpreted and supplemented through Heidegger's poetic understanding of the "without why" of the concealing and unconcealing of Being, and the phenomenology of Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion will contribute to a more theological exploration of divine (en)folding.

1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 154.

2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962),  214.

3 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 214.

4 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 151.

5 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 124.

6 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 126-127.

7 Corrington, Robert S., "Unfolding/Enfolding: The Categorial," Semiotics 2002.

8 See Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, (I) "God is a Unique One; whoever wants to enjoy Him/Must, no less than He, be enclosed in Him."  See also Eckhart (IV) "God engenders himself as myself."

9 Keller, Catherine. "The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology," JAAR 76 (4) 905.

 

Colleen Hartung, Chicago Theological Seminary
"Rethinking Faith in the Context of Polydoxy"

In this paper--via the projects of Schneider, Rivera and some of the work of Keller, which turn us toward the uncertain, the complicated, beyond the boundaries of a logic of the One and totalizing conceptions of transcendence--I will explore the question of the status of faith in relation to ambiguity, multiplicity and so forth.  I suggest that within the context of a theology that would foreground the uncertain and name itself polydoxy, faith itself is realized as other than a faith that we call on to save us from the trials and disasters that threaten order and certainty.  This is more than (and less than) a faith that accepts the unpredictable tribulations of our lives as evidence of the unknowable nature of God's ultimately benevolent designs; and it is more than (and less than) a faith that might provisionally gesture toward a naming of divine occurrence and an relational incarnational taking place.  What this paper seeks to make intelligible is the question of the possibility of a more ambiguous, risky and life-filled conception of faith; a faith that could and would turn toward the edges of security and order and live at the boundary between chaos and order, between life and death, certainty and uncertainty, law and spirit and so on.  

The work of Laurel C. Schneider in Theology of Multiplicity, Mayra Rivera in Touch of Transcendence, and Catherine Keller in Face of the Deep, read side by side, make apparent the idea of uncertainty as an elemental part of the focus and character of a theology that would seek to call itself polydoxy.  Within their respective projects they explore the nature of uncertainty as experience of divine occurrence (Schneider) and as experienced as the taking place of Divinity within relational encounter (Rivera) and in the elemental fluidity of reality (Keller).

Each of these authors seek to make uncertain the traditional foundations of faith; Schneider via her deconstruction of the logic of the One, Rivera via her deconstructive/reconstructive consideration of transcendence, and Keller via her hermeneutic consideration of complication.  And so it seems curious that these projects also ground themselves in claims that have the ring of certainty about uncertainty.  Is staking such claims in projects that intentionally turn toward uncertainty something like a hedge against the ambiguous or a qualification of the uncertain?  Or, alternatively, in the context of a thinking that takes uncertainty seriously, does faith itself become something more complicated, something slippery, uncertain, multiple and ambiguous?

 

Beatrice E. Marovich, Drew University Theological School
"Political Creatures in Theological Cosmologies: Exploring New Frontiers in Theological/Political Agonism"

THINKERS OF A NEW, "deep", multidimensional democratic pluralism (such as William Connolly) have begun to employ the notion of agonism. The need for a relational agonism of respect has been especially crucial with regard to the turbulent topic of the religious. Connolly, for example, charges communities of faith, creed, or tradition to embed agonistic respect into mutual relations.

While such accounts do promise some shift in the public engagement of religious practice and discourse, these agonistic relational dynamics often seem to rely on channels of engagement that develop along identity-based lines of religious affiliation. They are methods of engagement, in other words, that might be limited to those whose identities congeal around a particular creed or tradition. But on what level might the growing ranks of the religiously "unaffiliated" engage with this public encounter?1 In the spirit of multiplying the potential sites of engagement within this contestational public, this paper will explore some of the latent agonistic tensions, not between identities, but between concepts that remain more philosophical or (even politically) doctrinal. I will look, in other words, at the possibility of a relational agonism of respect between constructs of the theological/political variety (the most familiar being the church/state, or the religious/secular agonisms). Developing discourse along this dynamic register may, I want to suggest, open multiple avenues for exploring the relationship between the theological and the political--postures that develop along identity-based lines of affiliation but ones that confound, or challenge, them as well.

Turning, primarily, to the work of quasi-Catholic French philosopher Simone Weil, I will suggest that theological/political agonisms can be read differently than, for example, religious contra secular identities. Indeed, the agonistic tension between the theological and the political can also be set loose within one body. This is, I think, particularly apparent in the agonistic tension present between Weil's constructs of force and supernature. Weil argued that religion was not so much private, or secular, as it was "supernatural". Her reading of this doctrine connected it umbilically to notions such as love and justice. When these constructs took on supernatural contours they took on an unfinished, inexhaustible, always potent aspect. In the case of supernatural grace (sometimes described as a near photosynthetic reception), the supernatural could also approach affective registers. While these forms of engagement folded into materiality they could be distinguished from the facet of necessity that Weil called the empire of force. Force was a wielding of, or bending to, power: a notion most succinctly developed in her essay on the Iliad. Force was inevitable, a radically inclusive regime that could refer to brutal violence as much as it could the pressures of time and biology resulting in mortality. Force is not, in fact, drastically unlike Chantal Mouffe's understanding of the political.2 The difference, of course, being that Mouffe follows Carl Schmitt in asserting that nothing acts in agonism or antagonism to the political. Following Weil, I want to suggest, we might instead begin to see intimations of an agonistic affability, or hospitality, that brushes up against configurations of force, or the political. More, this strange supernatural contrast to force seeks to entice us on both affective and conceptual registers, cultivating a theological/political agonism that seeks to be manifest on the level of attention and perception.

1 By some accounts, this is the fastest-growing "religious demographic" in the United States. A notorious 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts this number (which includes atheists, agnostics, and simply unaffiliated) at just over 16 percent of the U.S. population. See: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey", availlable at http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations, accessed on 10 June 2009.

2 Working off of Carl Schmitt's understanding of the political, Mouffe distinguishes it from politics (the "ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence"). The political is, "the dimension of hostility and antagonism that is an ever-present possibility in all human society, an antagonism that can take many different forms." See: Chantal Mouffe, "Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship", in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, Hent DeVries & Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 323.

 

Dhawn Martin, Drew University Theological School
"Souled Out: A Tale of Multipli-Cities"

A lingering soma/psuche divide haunts contemporary theo-political imagination: the body-politic conceived as soulless mass of rational agents bound by the demands of globalization. In an effort to disrupt capital's continued rationalization of political bodies into consumptive units, this essay engages in a little soul-searching. A Deleuze-inspired venture through certain terrains of Western thought, the search arrives at a concept of the body as, what we might call, souled-out. That is, amidst crosscurrents that variously x-out the social and integral connection of soma/psuche, this essay discovers traces of body-politics not as soulless, but multiply ensouled and embodied - as relational mulitpli-cities.    

Deleuze's construction of "contemplative souls" (âmes contemplative), with its allusions, intended or not, to traditions of religious contemplation, its deep reliance upon Nietzsche and aversion to the "beautiful soul" of Platonism, invites exploration of these three soul-full trajectories. This essay thus posits the souled-out as a Deleuzian "simulacrum." This simulacrum, as all simulacra, potentially creates a movement in which "divergent series" (in this case Christian, Nietzschean, Platonic and Deleuzian soul-talk) through their "internal resonances" subvert, by their very divergence, dominant discourses of the Same/One (The Logic of Sense).

In search of resonant divergences, this essay looks to the biblical injunction to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength which places "soul" ambiguously amidst the corporeal and rational in its love/contemplation of the divine (Deut.6:5; Mt. 22:37; Lk.10:27).  This ambiguity colluding with notions of the soul as mediating the immortal and mortal, opens the possibility of conceiving psuche as a love dynamic of undetermined, yet potentially transformative, encounter. This encountering soul, however, even with the call to love neighbor as self, remains somewhat solitary. 

"Organic syntheses" which "contract," make claims upon, and rejoice in their elemental environments, Deleuze's souls manifest through various, inter-related bodies (Difference and Repetition). This Deleuzian line of flight echoes Nietzsche's allusions to "soul as social structure" and to "our body" as "but a social structure of many souls" (Beyond Good and Evil). These syntheses and interwoven structures suggest a way to think the body-soul relation as manifoldly social. Thus far construed, our body-politic exists as a multiplicity of souls structured by and within organic, social relations of transformative encounter. This multiply souled, or souled-out body, however, lacks specific connection to political theory and remains identified with emergent selves. It is here that Deleuze's redeployment of the philosophic "Idea" facilitates a fold of epochal proportions.

As a "notion of multiplicity which denounces simultaneously the One and the many…and the opposition of the many to the One," Deleuze's Idea of contemplative souls contracts within its non-oppositional movements traces of Platonic-Aristotelian conceptions of the human soul as microcosm not only of the polis/city but also of the universe (D&R). These traces, denuded of their One/many, model/copy hierarchies, manifest as constitutive of the "divergent series" internal to the particular "simulacrum" constructed thus far: the souled-out body politic.  This simulacrum, driven by its subversive resonances, draws - or so this essay wagers - the immanent planes of Deleuzian thought and the cosmopolis of the Greco-Roman political imagination (and its recent configurations by such thinkers as Bhabha and Connolly) into the deterritorialized realm of cosmopolitan multipli-cities. These cities of the multitude call for utopian, and therefore according to Deleuze "revolutionary," (What is Philosophy?) body-politics of the souled-out in which policies, residents and reforms are thought not as discrete or static entities to be commodified or saved, but as cosmo- and theo-political relations multiply incarnated.

 

Kathryn Reklis, Yale University
"Holographic Theopoetics: Multiplicity and History Narration in Jonathan Edwards"

This paper concerns Jonathan Edwards's practices of and metaphysical assumptions about narrating the grand drama of Christian history as apparent in his sermon-series/treatise A History of the Work of Redemption as read alongside his Two Dissertations and some of his Miscellanies. It is, at the same time, concerned to explore a holographic mode of narration as a constructive proposal for theology concerned with material and cultural specificity. In other words, the destabilizing and deconstructive reading of Edwards's own practices of history narration in relation to his neo-Platonic metaphysics is meant to open new methodological ground for thinking relational multiplicity without a collapse into divisive/competitive difference.

Influenced by the Cambridge Platonists and the new empiricism he learned from Newton and Locke, Edwards wrote the History as a cosmic story that could both account for every earthly phenomena (both natural and historical) and link those phenomena into the true spiritual history that held them all. His hope was to convince an increasingly skeptical audience that he had identified a functioning spiritual system that was knowable by the human mind when illuminated by the Divine Mind. This spiritual system, one often suspects, was nothing if not a monist totality -- all might be related but related through the flattening sameness of a totalizing whole -- God/the cosmos/divine reality. A reading of the Two Dissertations alongside the History, however, destabilizes this purely monist reading of Edwards by re-centering our thought on Edwards own notion of being as consent. "Consent," for Edwards, is both attraction toward and recognition of deep relationality with all beings in God's Being. While this relational ontology propels Edwards closer to something like openness to genuine multiplicity, his emphasis on harmony and proportionality in the composition of the divine Whole leaves no room for indeterminacy or difference enfolded, without destruction, into relationality.

Edwards's practices of history narration, however, yield another layer to his engagement with multiplicity and relationality. A common problem of the newly invented circum-Atlantic world of Edwards's age was how to grasp the whole of an oceanic interculture, the contours and limits of which could not be seen or even imagined. Edwards attempted this grasping by imagining the world as a vast trembling web of interrelated causes and effects, earthly realities overlaid with spiritual realities. To see the trembling web, one had to gather up as many threads as possible, so Edwards drew from eclectic sources ranging from the profound to the mind-numbingly mundane: newspaper accounts, theological treatises, folklore, travel narratives, naval records, shipping tonnage, etc. The wily nature of concrete particularity meant that these piecemeal and particular sources constantly escaped his best efforts at monistic unification. The concrete encounter with difference and multiplicity created a surplus his unifying system could not contain.

This surplus created through historical and cultural specificity is both instructional for a re-evaluation of Edwards, but even more so for a constructive proposal for holographic theopoetics. Such a proposal investigates the play of mind that sees in overlapping layers, glimpsed distinctly and always almost at the same time, moving between the mode of narration that relies on concrete experience of multiplicity as real difference and the mode of experimentation that moves provocatively and necessarily beyond the bounded concreteness of separate identities to imagine mutually (and multiply) constitutive relationality.

Eric Trozzo, Drew University Theological School
"God Ungrounded: Envisioning the Multiplicity of a God Beyond Being"

Can there be a negative multiplicity?  Drawing on strands of Buddhist thought, feminist theologian Laurel C. Schneider notes in Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity that complete emptiness is as much a totality as is unicity.  Given the fascination with forms of the abyss in much postmodern theology as a strategy for overcoming absolute claims, the question of multiplicity within an understanding of God as infinite or beyond being becomes particularly relevant in ensuring that the totality of divine singularity does not simply become re-inscribed in the inverted form of absolute nothingness.  This paper explores the possibility of constructing a theology of negative divine multiplicity, drawing on the cosmological vision of the 17th century Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme.   To demonstrate the radical potentials within Boehme's thought, I will briefly compare it to the similar project carried out by the 20th century neo-platonic Catholic philosopher Stanislas Breton, with an undercurrent of resonance between each and the Kyoto School of Zen Buddhism.

In Boehme's intricate vision, an erotic will to be revealed erupts into the undifferentiated infinity of the "unground."  This will pours itself out into the creation of multiplicity so that the unground may be revealed.  As Boehme describes in his uniquely obtuse language in his treatise Election of Grace, "The Conceiving or Comprehending [i.e. the infinite divine] is the Creating, and the Science or Root, viz. the Desire, is the Beginning ... to the Distinction, Variety, or Divisibility."  The unground can only be truly be called "God" or even "real" when combined with its will and the dark world of multiplicity, as it is the interaction of the will and the multiple that unleashes the creative potential of the unground; yet the will and the multiple exist to reveal the splendor of the undifferentiated infinity of the unground.  Thus the unground, the will, and the dark world are nondualistically one and multiple, and God is both absolute nothingness and yet only real when containing multiplicity within itself.  Several commentators have noted similarities between Boehme's thought and that of Kitaro Nishida's.

Breton's more recent neo-platonic articulation of a Christian cosmology also seeks to find multiplicity within the divine nothingness.  For him it is the kenotic withdrawal of the God who is nothingness par excellence that that creates possibility, so that being is but the "trace" of the divine withdrawal.  The cross becomes for him a sort of space on the limits of the trace of the divine kenosis, the cusp of the void of the One.  The cross critiques all attempts to define the divine, instead signaling a new God uncontainable by any definition; a God multiple rather than one.  It is the human task of creative imagining, then, to give names to this God in its multiple expressions.

While both Boehme and Breton seek to articulate a sense of multiplicity emanating from divine nothingness, Breton's system remains within a pluralist model that has one ultimate reality, the One that is nothingness in this case, that has multiple manifestations.  The integration of the multiple within the divine in Boehme's thought, however, begins to point towards a way of thinking about divine nothingness that moves beyond pluralism towards a deep multiplicity that can be fruitful for thinking about a non-totalizing God of the abyss.