Sensitive Chaos, Theodore Schwenk, Steiner Press

Drew Colloquium In Transdisciplinary

Theological Studies

T heology, a hybrid of Hebrew scripture and Greek theory from the start, may find its voice in the third Christian millennium through a revival of its radical tansdisciplinarity. By resituating the premodern overlap of theology, history and Bible within the postmodern interstices of philosophy, social analysis, and critical theory, a series of international colloquia will invite a fresh style of theological interaction.

C urrently the academic discipline of theology seems to oscillate between resuscitations of orthodoxy and abdications of the symbols of theology itself. The retreat to orthodoxy satisfies liturgical and intellectual desires for meaning, yet dulls the prophetic self-critical edge of its own traditions. The orthopraxis is feminist and liberation discourses continues to address a largely academic public. Yet it increasingly lacks resonance not only with its spiritual institutions, but with the philosophical, literary and critical theories by which the academy seeks to decolonize its own cultures. This series seeks a third space, neither a synthesis of opposing tendencies nor a conflation of disparate disciplines, but a transgressive and transformative, hence transdisciplinary, matrix of reflection. With its history of seminar-based theology enmeshed in continental philosophy and in interdisciplinary and interfaith traditions, with its recent leadership in feminist, multiethnic and transcultural practices combined with a width of contemporary theories, Drew is especially well placed to host such an ongoing symposium.

 

C olloquia will be held annually. At each Colloquium, a dozen or so scholars will join Drew faculty members to present perspectives and to discuss questions of common theological concern. Publication of the papers is anticipated. In order to sustain focus within a wide interdisciplinary metabolism, themes will be played out within the site of a particular doctrinal symbolism. Participants will be free to exemplify the methodological and doctrinal themes, deconstructively or reconstructively, from the vantage point of their current work.

The first two colloquia will be

(I) Fall of 2001: Interstitial Initiations/ Counterdiscourses of Creation

(II) Fall of 2002: The Colonial, the Postcolonial, and the Theological: Com/promised Lands

Steering Committee

Catherine Keller, Constructive Theology; Virginia Burrus, Early Church History; Stephen Moore, New Testament

Sponsored by

the Theological School of Drew University,

the Caperson School of Graduate Studies at Drew,

and the collaboration of the Culture and Belief Project of the Centre for Studies of Religion and Theology, Monash University, Melbourne.

If you have any questions, please contact us at nroskos@drew.edu

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Sensitive Chaos, Theodore Schwenk, Steiner Press