This article argues for a version of sacred naturalism within the framework of a processual metaphysics that characterizes the cosmos as an interplay between Chaos (disunity) and Logos (unity). I argue that although creativity is highly valuable from the perspective of life and humanity, at a cosmic scale it is overshadowed by the universal tendencies toward conservation and destruction. Within this metaphysical picture I develop a naturalist notion of the sacred as a phenomenological object inspiring particularly intense feelings of inner (...) harmony but functioning eudaemonically to strengthen mind, body, and soul against forms of Chaos, whether anomie, stress, or personal conflict. After developing some criteria for a sacred but immanent meta-unity in contrast to the transcendental unities of traditional religion, I describe how the unity of the cosmos might be experienced as a sacred object by emphasizing its heterarchical, aesthetic and life-affirming dimensions. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

A mutual relation between God and the world provides a crucial distinction between panentheism and both classical theism and pantheism. Several proposals responding to Analytical Theology's challenge to distinguish panentheism from other forms of theism are considered and found inadequate. After defining mutual relation, conceptual evidence and the frequency of descriptions of panentheism that affirm a mutual relation between God and the world provide evidence that a mutual relation is crucial to distinguishing panentheism. Finally, benefits of recognizing a mutual relation (...) between God and the world as crucial to panentheism are described. (shrink)

Three monographs published between 2012 and 2015 are considered here, in particular concerning their treatment of the so-called Chaoskampf myth in the Hebrew Bible and in the ancient Near East. The first two, by Gregory Mobley and Bernard Batto, still hold to the traditional Gunkelian approach to this subject and think that the Chaoskampf motif of Enūma elish is behind Gen. 1 and hence that creation is the result of conflict. While Mobley’s view is more ideological and theological, Batto focuses (...) more on the literary and religious aspects of this myth, referring to it as a “Combat Myth.” However, as the title of the third monograph shows, Debra Ballentine limits herself to discussing only the conflict myth, mainly that in Ugaritic and Hebrew texts, and avoids the use of the term “chaos.” She follows David Tsumura and Rebecca Watson in accepting that there is no connection between these storm images and the creation motif, either in the ancient Near East—except for Enūma elish—or in the Bible. Focusing on the Chaoskampf mythology and its relationship with the biblical traditions, one can observe sharp differences among the three authors. (shrink)

Feminism as a radical discourse has always been a challenge to Christian Theology. The contemporary deconstructive feminist social thought that signals a radical epistemic shift in transnational politics, economics and culture invokes theology to re-locate its methodology and focus. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstructive feminism re-positions contemporary feminist thought in a post-Marxist, postcolonial, and postmodern epistemological context. This article tries to explore the methodological significance of the Spivakian de-constructive feminist epistemology and to sketch out its implications on the contemporary theological program. (...) The thesis is analysed in three major sections. The first section is an introduction to the Spivakian epistemological ‘itinerary’. The second section tries to explicate the contours of Spivakian feminist epistemology by elucidating three specific categories, viz: subalternity, marginality, and planetarity. The third section explores its implications on theological methodology in conversation with some of the contemporary postcolonial feminist theologians who engage creatively with Spivak. Spivakian feminist epistemology is being signified here in order to re-imagine a feminist systematic theology in a post-globalized context. (shrink)

Often seen as a typical Chaoskampf, the cosmic struggle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish, looked at closely belies this reading that has been dominating scholarship since the nineteenth century. Through a close-reading of the epic’s narrative against its modern/colonial reception, the article argues that Enuma Elish provides a rich and complex narrative in which motherhood and monstrosity do not oppose each other, nor do they run together with each other. The textual, historical and (...) philological analyses, as well as reception-critiques, ultimately serve to theorize from within the ancient cosmology an immanent and decolonial logic that is beyond ‘either/or’. (shrink)

The political theorist William E. Connolly reads Augustine 's Confessions as an exhortation to deny the paradox of identity/difference. The paradox for Connolly is this: if one confesses a true identity, one must be false to difference, but if one is true to difference, one must sacrifice the promise of true identity. I revisit Augustine 's Confessions here in order to offer a reading of their paradoxical character that contrasts with Connolly's. I will argue that Augustine 's confession does not (...) deny the paradox of identity/difference but exemplifies what it means to struggle within it. I turn to James Wetzel's work on Augustine 's idea of free will and Catherine Keller's work on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo to suggest that treating Augustine 's confession as confession reveals this struggle. (shrink)

On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...) suggest that, even though the existence of horrendous evil does not resolve evidential ambiguity in favour of atheism, there are reasonable value commitments that would preclude those who hold them from satisfying extended Jamesian fideist conditions for committing themselves to classical theism. I then begin a discussion of a possible revisionary theistic alternative (in the Christian tradition) which – one might hope – may meet those conditions. An earlier, shorter, version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

Plato defined the primal dualism of reality: its division into the invisible eternal realm of thought and the unshaped matrix of the visible temporal realm of corporeality. The hierarchy of mind over body is reflected in the hierarchy of male over female, of human over animals, and in the class hierarchy of rulers over workers. Plato adds the alienation from body and earth, as the lowest level of cosmic hierarchy. The interrelatedness and interdependence of all cosmic beings uncover the dualism: (...) soul/body. The idea of creatio ex nihilo promotes the desecration of the created world, lying at the root of the eco-crisis. The patristic idea of creation ‘ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων’ [‘out of non-being’] refers to what in God is envisaged as the pre-ontological nihil from which all proceed, deconstructing the dualism of a spiritual and a materialistic cosmos. (shrink)

In recent continental philosophy of religion there has been significant attention paid to the Abrahamic doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, especially by deconstructive thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, and Keller. For these thinkers, the doctrine represents a form of agency that does violence to various forms of alterity. While broadly supportive of their fundamental philosophical and ethico-political views, especially about the primordiality of alterity, I differ from them in that I argue that creation ex nihilo articulates the (...) very structure of the alterity they are concerned with. The essay proceeds through a reading of Derrida’s representation of the doctrine and a “deconstruction” of his view by means of a reading of Augustine and Anselm. (shrink)

Looking back over the last 40 years of work in the philosophy of religion provides a fascinating vantage point from which to assess the state of the discipline today. I describe central features of American philosophy of religion in 1970 and reconstruct the last 40 years as a progression through four main stages. This analysis offers an overarching framework from which to examine the major contributions and debates of process philosophy of religion during the same period. The major thinkers, topics, (...) positions, and controversies are presented, analyzed, and critiqued. In the concluding section I offer a critical appraisal of the state of the field today based on the results of these historical analyses. (shrink)

Although every cell in a human body contains the same DNA, every cell uses its DNA differently, in unique interaction with its environment. Human bodies live and thrive because their cells and tissues are sustained in a whole whose life emerges from, but cannot be reduced to, its parts. Living creatures are organized systems of processes that maintain their identity not despite change but because of it. These biological observations resonate with the foundational New Testament metaphor of the Body of (...) Christ and with process-theological descriptions of creatures as open-ended processes interacting within a creation itself sustained within the boundless loving creativity of the Creator. I will map contemporary biological understanding of bodies as emergent and processual onto the theological metaphor of the Body of Christ and explore the ideas that emerge in terms of relationships between scripture, communities, and the life of the church. (shrink)

Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible knits together process theology and relational ontology with quantum mechanics. In quantum physics, she finds a new resource for undoing the architecture of classical metaphysics and its location of autonomous human subjects as the primary gears of ethical agency. Keller swarms theology with the quantum perspective, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, by which quantum particles are found to remain influential over each other long after they have been physically separated—what Albert (...) Einstein and his collaborators recklessly dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” This spooky action, Keller suggests, reroutes process thought—classically concerned with flux—to a new concern with intransigence—particularly the intransigence of the ethical relationship. Attending to the ethical urgency of the Other, she leaves process theology in a position of susceptibility to the moral imperative posed by the marginalized, the victimized, and the oppressed. This essay argues that although the ontological work of Keller's book productively integrates quantum physics into process theology, the ethical dimension of relationality is left cold in the quantum field. This is because, contra the ethical framework of contemporary deconstruction, which, following Emmanuel Levinas, sees ethical relationships as emerging out of a dynamic of infinite distance, moral connection has nothing to do with the remote reaches of the quantum scale or the macro-scale limits of space—nothing to do with “infinity” at all. Ethics emerges out of a much messier landscape—the evolved dynamic of fleshy, finite, material bodies. Rather than seeing ethical labor as a matter of physics, my contention is that interdisciplinary undertakings like Cloud of the Impossible are ethical disciplinary practices, re-acquainting us with the non-sovereignty of the self in order to open up new habits of relating rather than spotlighting ethical imperatives. (shrink)

Climate change is a temporally fragmented phenomenon: the causes and effects at work are dispersed over a remarkably long time period. Climate change exceeds human ability to forecast and quantify its effects in time. This creates serious epistemic, moral, and psychological difficulties and poses challenges to generating adequate ethical responses. Augustine’s understanding of time as a measure of imagination emphasizes the way in which human beings actively shape their sense of time. He sees “looking forward” in time as a matter (...) of spiritual vocation that collects the self out of dispersion and connects to a transgenerational collective. A notable example of how this “looking forward” may be practiced is singing the Psalms. The Augustinian “temporal imagination” links the imaginative, affective, moral, and vocational dimensions of measuring time. This offers some preliminary avenues for reimagining a sense of time responsive to climate change’s temporal fragmentation. (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium, theologians and secular scholars of religion have increasingly begun exploring the relationship between transhumanism and religion. However, analyses of anti-transhumanist apocalypticisms are still rare, and those that exist are situated mainly among broader explorations of religious and secular bioconservatism. This article addresses this lack of specificity by drawing analyses of transhumanism and religion into dialogue with explorations of contemporary demonology through a close study of the beliefs of the evangelical conspiracist Thomas Horn and the (...) anti-transhumanist milieu around him. Exploring the milieu's multifaceted demonology of the secular world in light of genealogies of religion and secularity, the article situates Horn's demonology as one attempt to negotiate these genealogies, using what Sean McCloud terms a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” that sees spiritual forces as the structural base of reality. It argues that, while fringe, milieus like Horn's illuminate broader cultural tensions and genealogical relations surrounding the place of religion in a secular world. (shrink)

An ecological focus is not simply an additional perspective to add to a multidimensional approach to feminist theologies. Ecological thinking requires a fundamental shift of perspective, so that the focus of feminism, traditionally a human focus, is rethought within the frame of the materiality that constitutes not only humans but Earth and cosmos. As a way of situating feminist theological discourses and experiences ecologically, this article focuses on a shared materiality as a basis for reframing human being, dwelling, agency and (...) labour, in terms of co-being, habitat, co-agency and more-than-human labour. This reframing implies a rethinking of human freedom that has implications for how we engage with feminist theologies in relation to the future of Earth and humankind. (shrink)

This thesis philosophically examines, critically discusses, and proposes how a plausible philosophical framework of consciousness and free will should be formulated. This framework takes into account contemporary scientific research on human consciousness and free will and its possible challenges; also it is examined how this framework should be related to theistic beliefs – especially those connected to human and divine consciousness and free will. First, an overview of important research within the natural sciences about the conscious mind is presented together (...) with its challenges to a theistic worldview. Next, questions related to reductive physicalism and dualism as a thesis and an antithesis are discussed. This dialectical approach leads to two lines for possible alternatives: emergence theories and process panpsychism. The subsequent analysis suggests that a form of process panpsychism in combination with a weaker form of emergence is most plausible. After a discussion of some central ideas about determinism and indeterminism, together with a brief overview of standard arguments within the philosophical free will debate, the proposed emergent process panpsychism is related to these standard arguments in the free will debate and scientific research about decision-making. As a result it will be suggested how free will should be understood in relation to the emergent process panpsychism. The consequences of these results are then discussed in relation to a theistic worldview. Here panentheism will be suggested as the most reasonable conception of God. Also, the consequences for divine consciousness, divine action and interaction, the human soul, life before birth and after death, and more briefly a personal relationship with God, theological determinism, omniscience, and omnipotence will be discussed specifically in relation to panentheism in an emergent process panpsychist setting. (shrink)

Theists in general and Christians in particular have good grounds for affirming divine action in relation to twenty-first-century science. Although humans cannot perceive with their five senses the causation—both divine and creaturely—at work in our world, they have reasons to believe God acts as an efficient, but never sufficient, cause in creation. The essential kenosis option I offer overcomes liabilities in other kenosis proposals, while accounting for a God who acts personally, consistently, persuasively, and yet in diversely efficacious ways. We (...) can reasonably infer that the love, beauty, and truth expressed in creation derive from divine and creaturely causation. (shrink)

How are we theologically imagining feminism’s further becomings at this juncture of multiple intertwined uncertainties? Aided by a poem by Emily Dickinson, this meditation on a transfeminist potentiality within and beyond Christianity plies a trinity of entanglement, mystery, and multiplicity.

Approaches to Nietzsche’s political philosophy abound. In this article, however, we explore the possibility of identifying not only a political philosophy, but also a political-theological reading in Nietzsche’s texts. In fact, such a political-theological reading already has something of a genealogy. In the 1960s, “radical theology” appropriated the Nietzschean topic of the death of God, which engendered a transferred radical political theology consisting in radical democracy. The first part of this article explores twentieth-century political theologies surrounding the death of God. (...) We ask herein if this is the only possible political-theological reading of Nietzsche’s texts. The second part argues that, in fact, we can ascribe to Nietzsche a “theological” intention that is transferable to his political theory in a way that differs from the attempts of radical political theology and other political theologies surrounding the death of God. We conclude that, in any case, Nietzsche’s political theology aims to counterbalance St. Paul’s nihilism more than to constitute a determined political view. (shrink)

Abstract. Darwinism has attracted proportionately less attention from Jewish thinkers than from Christian thinkers. One significant reason for the disparity is that the theodicies created by Jews to contend with the catastrophes which punctuated Jewish history are equally suited to address the massive extinctions which characterize natural history. Theologies of divine hiddenness, restraint, and radical immanence, coming together in the sixteenth-century mystical cosmogony of Isaac Luria, have been rehabilitated and reworked by modern Jewish thinkers in the post-Darwin era.

One of my projects as a Research Fellow for The Institute for Theological Partnerships at the University of Winchester is the Feminist Theology and Art Forum. This project was born out of my Doctoral thesis which combines both art and feminist liberation theologies. Thus creating a methodology in which art as language gives voice to women’s experience within the theological world. The Forum so far has opened a window of opportunity for female artists and feminist theologians alike to exhibit visual (...) artwork that demonstrates their incarnational experience through the concept of Christ/a and Mary/miriam from a feminist theological perspective. There have been two exhibitions with a third exhibition this year which will have a feminist ecological/theological theme highlighting the important role that many women globally play in their own wellbeing and flourishing in connection with the Earth/gaia. This article moves briefly from personal experience, which is where all feminist theology begins, into the wider world of possibilities for women to use both art and feminist theology as a model for expressing another way of speaking their experience theologically, ecologically, socially and politically and in so doing create a space in which they too may flourish. (shrink)

In this article, I contend that a concept of hope in terms of process theology can better deal with Miguel De La Torre's criticisms of theology of hope than Jurgen Moltmann's rightly famous treatment of this topic.

In feminist theology, the category of experience is given paramount importance. Here I examine this category and, specifically, what constitutes legitimate experience for theological reflection. Contending that both mainstream and feminist theologies dismiss too readily the individual’s quotidian experiences as a resource for exploring the Holy, I detail a methodological approach that combines the qualitative research practice of grounded theory with a Quaker practice of silent waiting, by giving prayerful attention to one-to-one interviews. I call this approach Grounded Theology. I (...) then describe the application of Grounded Theology to the study of quotidian experiences from interview data gathered for the purpose of theological reflection. (shrink)