Anatheism


Book Description

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


Book Description

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


Book Description

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.




Reimagining the Sacred


Book Description

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


Book Description

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


Book Description

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.




God, No!


Book Description

The outspoken half of magic duo Penn & Teller presents an atheist reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments, discussing why doubt, skepticism, and wonder should be celebrated and offering humorous stories from his own experiences.




Debating Otherness with Richard Kearney: Perspectives from South Africa


Book Description

Richard Kearney is one of the leading global thinkers in both Continental philosophy and post-metaphysical philosophy of religion, as well as an esteemed Irish professor in philosophy, currently teaching at Boston College, Massachusetts, USA. Professor Kearney first visited South Africa in May as joint visiting academic of the Universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria and North-West. The visit prompted the publication of this scholarly collected work, authored by South African and international scholars. These specialists in philosophy and religious studies analysed Kearney’s influential work and brought his scholarly perspectives into dialogue with other leading thinkers in the field, both from Africa and abroad. This publication will be the first collective attempt to engage his work from the perspective of the African continent. This collected work contributes significantly in an interdisciplinary way to Ricoeurdian studies. The target audience of the book is peers and specialists in the field of Continental philosophy and philosophy of religion.




The God Who May Be


Book Description

"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.




Richard Kearney's Anatheistic Wager


Book Description

This anthology of fifteen essays provides a variety of critical perspectives on the influential ideas in Richard Kearney’s Anatheism. Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, the distinguished philosopher 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. This volume examines 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.