THEORY TO NO END: Recent Episodes
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György Geréby is Associate professor in the Medieval Studies Department at the Central European University, Budapest and Vienna. He is Historian of Medieval and Late Antique philosophy and theology, with a research interest in methodology in medieval philosophy and theology, theory of language and proof, and its applicability to conceptual analysis. He has an additional interest in early Christianity and the apocrypha, and political theology.
In this episode we discuss his article titled, "Political Theology versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt," published in New German Critique 105, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2008.
Menachem Fisch is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is former President of the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science, and former Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Israel Academy of Science. He has held several visiting research positions and published numerous monographs and articles in a variety of fields related to the theology of the talmudic literature
In this episode we discuss The Aqedah and The Fall: Contrasting Paradigms of Rabbinic Religiosity, 2024, forthcoming in J-P. Fortin and H. Schulz (eds.), Aqedah: The Binding of Isaac (Gen 22) as a Challenge for the Rationality of Religion in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, De Gruyter, 2024.
György Geréby is Associate professor in the Medieval Studies Department at the Central European University, Budapest and Vienna. He is Historian of Medieval and Late Antique philosophy and theology, with a research interest in methodology in medieval philosophy and theology, theory of language and proof, and its applicability to conceptual analysis. He has an additional interest in early Christianity and the apocrypha, and political theology.
In this episode we discuss his article titled, "The Theology of Carl Schmitt," published in Politeja 18 (2021).
Adi Ophir is a visiting professor affiliated with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Middle East Studies. At the Cogut Institute, he directs the Political Concepts initiative. He is also Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. His current research focuses on political concepts as events, performances, and discursive apparatuses, with special attention to three concepts: “concept,” “political,” and “the Other.” He studies types of Others in general, and the structure and genealogy of one type of Other in particular–the Goy, the Jew’s Other. He is the founding editor of Theory and Criticism, Israel's leading journal for critical theory, and Mafte'akh: Lexical Review for Political Thought. His recent books include The One-State Condition (Stanford University Press, 2012), co-authored with Ariella Azoulay; Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (Hebrew, The Van Leer Institute, 2013); and Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-authored with Ishai Rosen-Zvi.
In this episode we discuss his latest book: In the beginning was the state: divine violence in the Hebrew Bible (Fordham University Press, 2023).
Siphiwe Ignatius Dube is Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and has also supervised) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus, recipient of the Prince of Wales Scholarship, the Don Norton Award, the NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and a PASRC Fellow amongst other achievements. His current two projects focus on African Political Theology and the Religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa.
In this episode we discuss his article titled, "Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity and/as Black Consciousness," published in Political Theology, 2024.
Miguel Vatter is Professor in Political Science at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. He has published extensively on political theology. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, his most recent books are Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt ( 2021) and Divine Democracy: Political Theology After Carl Schmitt (2020). A complete list of publications is found here: https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/miguel-vatter
In this episode we discuss his book chapter titled, "Atheism, Post-secularism and the Legitimacy of Democracy" published in Political Theology Today: 100 Years after Carl Schmitt in 2023.
Erica Weiss is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She is a cultural anthropologist researching the ways people navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter during their everyday lives and with people who are different than themselves. She does her research in Israel and Palestine, using ethnographic methods.
In this episode we discuss her article titled, "Divergent and Emergent Political Theologies of Peace Amongst Jewish Israelis," published in Political Theology in March 2024.
Jennifer Rust is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English at Saint Louis University. Her research interests include Early modern English literature, Shakespeare, Spenser, Renaissance prose fiction, Catholic writing in the English Reformation, political theology, religious studies, critical theory, gender and sovereignty. Her book is titled, The Body in Mystery: the Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014.
In this episode we discuss two of her recent articles:
“Ad Salutem Publicam: public health and pastoral government in More’ Utopia.” Textual Practice. May 2023, Vol. 37 Issue 5, p. 706-724.
“Political Theology, Pastoral Power, and Resistance.” Political Theology. Feb. 2021, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p. 89-94.
Mary L. Hirschfeld is John T. Ryan Jr. Associate Professor of Theology and Business Ethics and Academic Director of the Business Ethics and Society Program at the University of Notre Dame. She works on the boundaries between theology and economics using an approach rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. She has written on economic inequality, the technocratic paradigm, the financial crisis and the common good.
Her book is titled, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018).
In this episode we discuss her article titled, “Rethinking Economic Inequality: A Theological Perspective,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 42(2) (June 2019): 259-282.
Luke Bretherton is Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Research Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining the Duke faculty in 2012, he was reader in Theology & Politics and convener of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King's College London. His latest book is Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019). His other books include Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was based on a four-year ethnographic study of broad-based community organizing initiatives in London and elsewhere; Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing; and Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Routledge, 2006), which develops constructive, theological responses to pluralism in dialogue with broader debates in moral philosophy. Specific issues addressed in his work include euthanasia and hospice care, debt and usury, fair trade, environmental justice, racism, humanitarianism, the treatment of refugees, interfaith relations, secularism, nationalism, church-state relations, and the church’s involvement in social welfare provision and social movements. Alongside his scholarly work, he writes in the media (including The Guardian, The Times and The Washington Post) on topics related to religion and politics, has worked with a variety of faith-based NGOs, mission agencies, and churches around the world, and has been actively involved over many years in forms of grassroots democratic politics, both in the UK and the US. His primary areas of research, supervision, and teaching are Christian ethics, political theology, the intellectual and social history of Christian moral and political thought, the relationship between Christianity and capitalism, missiology, interfaith relations, and practices of social, political, and economic witness. He has received a number of grants and awards, including a Henry Luce III Fellowship (2017-18).
In this episode we discuss his latest book, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019).
Lee Ward is Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. He has published widely in the areas of Political Theory and American Political Thought. His books include The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2004), John Locke and Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Modern Democracy and the Theological-Political Problem in Spinoza, Rousseau and Jefferson (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and Recovering Classical Liberal Political Economy: Natural Rights and the Harmony of Interests (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). He is editor of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Hackett Publishing, 2016). He has also published articles on John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Algernon Sidney, Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill, Irish republicanism, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas that have appeared in several leading academic journals.
In this episode we discuss his 2022 article published in Political Theology titled, "Political Theology and Constitutionalism in Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas."
Steve Knepper is an associate professor in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His main areas of expertise are philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and American literature. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond, which was published in 2022 by SUNY Press and will soon be re-released as a paperback, and he is currently editing A Heart of Flesh: William Desmond and the Bible. His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in several journals.
Robert Wyllie is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Political Economy Program at Ashland University. He teaches courses in political economy, history, and political philosophy, and he has published articles in Constellations, Perspectives on Political Science, Polis, Res Philosophica, TELOS, and other scholarly journals. In this episode we discuss two of his articles on Cormac McCarthy: "Kierkegaard Talking Down Schopenhauer: The Sunset Limited as a Philosophical Dialogue." The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2016) 14 (2): 186–203. "Principles that transcend money": Veterans Between Markets and Fate in No Country for Old Men. Forthcoming.
John Lippitt is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics & Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia, based in Sydney. John’s research interests include virtue ethics and the moral psychology of the virtues; forgiveness; philosophical and theological aspects of love and friendship; and the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. He also has an active interest in the ethics of policing. In this episode we discuss John's latest monograph, Love's Forgiveness, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
For a detailed biography and bibliography, please follow the link below:
https://www.notredame.edu.au/research/institute-for-ethics-and-society/staff/john-lippitt
Philip Clayton holds the Ingraham Chair at Claremont School of Theology, where he directs the PhD program in comparative theologies and philosophies; he is also affiliated faculty at Claremont Graduate University. He has published two dozen books and some 350 articles. Philip is President of the Institute for Ecological Civilization (EcoCiv.org). He is also president of the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China. As a scholar, Philip Clayton works at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and science. His more recent focus has turned toward the intersection of climate science, ethics, religion, and social philosophy, or ecotheology. You can access more information about his work here: https://cst.edu/academics/faculty/philip-clayton
https://www.philipclayton.net/
In this episode we discuss concepts from his book titled, God and Gravity: A Philip Clayton Reader on Science and Theology, edited by Bradford McCall (2018).
https://www.amazon.com/God-Gravity-Clayton-Science-Theology/dp/1532649568/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Christopher T. Fan is Assistant Professor at UC Irvine in the departments of English, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Studies, and a senior editor at Hyphen magazine, which he also co-founded. His research and writing focus on 20/21st c. Anglophone and Asian/American cultural production, speculative fiction, and racial form. He received his PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley in 2016, and was formerly a UC Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the English department at UC Riverside.
In addition to Hyphen, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Post45, Public Books, The New Inquiry, and American Literary History: Forum.
He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Principles of Selection: Asian American Fiction after 1965, about post-1965 Asian/American fiction (especially science fiction) as an articulation of immigration policy and US-Asia political economy.
We discuss two of his articles:
"Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature," American Literary History 33.1 (Spring, 2021).
"Melancholy Transcendence: Ted Chiang and Asian American Postracial Form," Post45: Peer Reviewed (November 6, 2014).
Joanna Leidenhag is Lecturer in Theology and Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds, UK. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working on a book outlining how the natural and psychological sciences can be used as a constructive resource for theological reflection, as well as pursuing a project on theology & autism. Her first monograph, published with T&T Clark in 2021, is called Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation. In this book, Joanna argued that panpsychism provides a more promising metaphysical framework for a Christian doctrine of creation than emergence theory. In preparation for this book, Joanna published the article “A Critique of Emergent Theologies,” which we discuss on this podcast.
Michael Millerman is a scholar of political philosophy working primarily on classical political rationalism and phenomenology. He is the author of Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia and an MA and PhD in Political Science (Political Theory) from the University of Toronto. In connection with his research, he has translated several books by the Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin. For more information, visit michaelmillerman.ca.
In this episode we discuss Millerman's article titled, "The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin’s Populism" published in Telos 193, Winter 2020.
Christian J. Emden is Frances Moody Newman Professor, Professor of German Intellectual History and Political Thought, and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures at Rice University. He is also one of the directors of Rice’s Program in Politics, Law and Social Thought. His work falls into the field of modern German and European intellectual history with an emphasis on political thought. Within the wider context of modern intellectual history, Emden’s research is mainly concerned with varieties of political realism, especially as they focus on the relationship between active political citizenship and the demands of the modern state, and he is also interested in postnational manifestations of political citizenship. A second line of inquiry is concerned with the emergence of normativity and the conditions of normative order. This approach often links recent discussions in philosophical naturalism to central issues in political theory and the history of political thought. For a list of publications follow the link below: https://politics.rice.edu/faculty/christian-j-emden
Gerald C. Liu is assistant professor of worship and preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned his BA in music at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, his Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University (during which time he was also a theological fellow at Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany), and his PhD from Vanderbilt University with a concentration in homiletics and liturgics.
Liu has previously served as a British Methodist minister in Nottingham, England before becoming ordained in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church. Currently, he volunteers as a minister in residence at Church of the Village, a United Methodist congregation in Manhattan, and he also preaches and teaches ecumenically in congregations and communities of faith nearby and abroad on a regular basis.
We discuss his book titled, Music and the Generosity of God (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
David T. Pan is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, on the Commission on Unalienable Rights at the U.S. State Department, and as the Editor of Telos.
We discuss the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf) and David Pan's article titled, "Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty" published in Telos, issue 192, Fall 2020.
Aryeh Botwinick is Professor of Religion at Temple University. He is the author of Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche (Cornell University Press, 1997), Michael Oakeshott’s Skepticism (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics: A Critique and a Re-Appropriation (Routledge, 2014). His work focuses upon exploring the deep affinities and continuities between monotheism, skepticism, and liberalism—and how studying and theorizing them gives rise to new configurations for understanding both their history and their current potential.
The article we discuss is titled, "Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." It was published in Telos, issue 192, Fall 2020.
Mark Noll is Research Professor of History at Regent College and a leading church historian. He recently retired as the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, having previously served as Professor of History and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. His teaching included courses on American religious and intellectual history, the Reformation, world Christianity, and Canadian history.
Dr. Noll has written and edited numerous books, most recently including Evangelicals: Who they Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (with George Marsden and David Bebbington, Eerdmans, 2019), In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life (OUP, 2015), From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story (Baker Academic, 2014), Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2011), and Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (co-written with Carolyn Nystrom, IVP, 2011). He has also served on the editorial boards for Books & Culture and Christian History, and as co-editor of Library of Religious Biography for Wm. B. Eerdmans. In 2006 he received the National Endowment for the Humanities medal at the White House.
We discuss a select chapter from Evangelicals: Who they Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be (with George Marsden and David Bebbington, Eerdmans, 2019), titled, "Noun or Adjective? The Fanatical Ravings of a Nominalist." https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7695/evangelicals.aspx
Michael C. Rea is Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses primarily on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and analytic theology. He has written or edited more than ten books and forty articles, and has given numerous lectures in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Russia, China, and Iran, including the 2017 Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews.
We discuss select chapters from his book titled, The Hiddenness of God (Oxford University Press, 2018). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-hiddenness-of-god-9780198826019?cc=us⟨=en&#
Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC and American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, and is the author of twenty books including Care for Creation (coauthored with Keith Warner and Pamela Woods) which won two Catholic Press Book Awards in 2009, first place for social concerns and second place in spirituality. Her book The Emergent Christ won a third place Catholic Press Book Award in 2011 for the area of Science and Religion. Her recent books include The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis, 2013), which received the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award and a third place Catholic Press Association Award for Faith and Science. Ilia holds two honorary doctorates, one from St. Francis University in 2015, and one from Sacred Heart University in 2020.
Additional titles and information can be found here: https://christogenesis.org/about/ilia-delio/
In this episode we discuss Ilia Delio's article titled, "Suffering and Sacrifice in an Unfinished Universe: The Energy of Love," published in Religions, July 2020.
Terrence W. Deacon is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition.
Dr. Deacon received a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard university in 1984. He taught at Harvard from 1984-1992, at Boston University from 1992-2002, and was a research associate at McLean Hospital and the Harvard Medical School from 1992-2000, before joining the University of California, Berkeley. His honors include being a Harvard Lehman Fellow, a Harvard Medical School Psychiatric Neuroscience Fellow, a Western Washington University Centenary Alumni Fellow, and the 69th James Arthur Lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History.
He has published over 100 research papers in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and his acclaimed book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) was awarded the I. J. Stanley Prize for the most influential book in Anthropology in 2005 by the School of American Research.
His 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: The Emergence of Mind from Matter, explores the problem of explaining the emergence of end-directed processes in nature, from biological functions to mental processes, and integrates many of his interests in complex biological systems.
In this interview we discuss his article titled, "The Emergent Process of Thinking as Reflected in Language Processing."
John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, Visiting Professor at King’s College, London, and Honorary Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford University. He has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.
A complete list of John Cottingham's publications and research interests can be found on his webpage: https://www.johncottingham.co.uk/
We discuss his recent book titled, In Search of the Soul, Princeton UP, 2020.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174426/in-search-of-the-soul
John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, Visiting Professor at King’s College, London, and Honorary Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford University. He has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.
A complete list of John Cottingham's publications and research interests can be found on his webpage: https://www.johncottingham.co.uk/
We discuss his article, "From desire to encounter: the human quest for the infinite," published in Religious Studies, 2019.
Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra.
Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.
He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His recent single-authored books include The Common Mind (OUP 1996), Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002), Penser en Societe (PUF, Paris 2004), Examen a Zapatero (Temas de Hoy, Madrid 2008), Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP 2008); On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (CUP 2012); Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (W.W.Norton 2014) and The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue and Respect (OUP 2015). His recent co-authored books include The Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith; A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain (PUP 2010), with Jose Marti; and Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (OUP 2011), with Christian List. He gave the Tanner lectures on Human Values at Berkeley in April 2015, which appeared in late 2018 with OUP, New York (with commentary by Michael Tomasello) as The Birth of Ethics: A Reconstruction of the Nature and Role of Morality. He is presenting the Locke lectures in Philosophy at Oxford University in Spring 2019.
We discuss his chapter titled, “Ethics without Transcendence” published in Ciphers of Transcendence. Essays in Philosophy of Religion in Honor of Patrick Masterson (2019).
David T. Pan is Professor of German in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, on the Commission on Unalienable Rights at the U.S. State Department, and as the Editor of Telos (http://www.telospress.com/).
We discuss his article titled, “Economy and Ecology: Federal Populism and the Devil in the Details of Universal Basic Income," published in Telos, issue 191, summer 2020.
http://www.telospress.com/telos-191-summer-2020-going-viral/
John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University.
He is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who treats "sacred" texts as a poetics of the human condition, or as a "theo-poetics," a poetics of the event harbored in the name of God. His past books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, The Weakness of God. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and has an interest in interacting with the working church groups like ikon and the “Emergent” Church. He is currently working in a book on our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled The Fate of All Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II.
Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, working on approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and also the presence in continental philosophy of radical religious and theological motifs. He has special interests in the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion and others); the critique of onto-theology; the question of post-modernism as "post-secularism;" the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with St. Augustine; the recent interest shown by philosophers in St. Paul; the link between Kierkegaard and deconstruction; Heidegger's early theological writings on Paul and Augustine; "secular" and "death of God" theology (Altizer, Vattimo, Zizek); medieval metaphysics and mysticism.
For a complete list of his publications please follow the link to his academic website: https://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/caputo-john-d/
In this interview we discuss his article titled, “The Theopoetic Reduction: Suspending the Supernatural Signified,” published in Literature and Theology, Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2019, pages 248–254.
Benjamin Straumann is Research Professor of Classics at New York University and Alberico Gentili Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. A historian of ideas, he is chiefly interested in classical political and legal thought, the history of natural and international law, constitutionalism, and the reception of classical political thought and Roman law in early-modern Europe. Benjamin is the author of Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2016); Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius' Natural Law (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and editor, with Benedict Kingsbury, of Alberico Gentili, The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De armis Romanis, (translated by David Lupher, Oxford University Press, 2011). He co-edits the book series History and Theory of International Law for Oxford University Press. He also co-edits the first volume on the classical world of the five-volume Cambridge History of Rights.
We discuss his recently published article titled, "Leaving the State of Nature: Polybius on Resentment and the Emergence of Morals and Political Order" (Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2020).
Paul Fiddes is professor of systematic theology at the University of Oxford and Principal Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow at Regent's Park College at Oxford. He is the author of numerous published works, including The Creative Suffering of God, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity, as well as Seeing the World and Knowing God. He also published his first novel--a mystery exploring the mythology and symbolism of the unicorn, titled A Unicorn Dies:A Novel of Mystery and Ideas. We discuss his article titled, "Forgiveness, Empathy, and Vulnerability: an unfinished conversation with pamela sue anderson" published in Angelaki issue 25 in February 2020.
Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal’s two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law.
We discuss Nehal's chapter titled, "What Should Freedom of Religion Become?" published in Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP), 2019.
Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida and the director of the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous essays and five books, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (California, 2002); Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001 (Duke, 2009); Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (Northwestern, 2014); and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (Peter Lang, 2014); and Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (Minnesota, 2020); as well as the editor of a new edition of Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Peter Lang, 2013). In 2017, he was honored as the recipient of the Society for Utopian Studies Lyman Tower Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship. We discuss his latest book, Invoking Hope (Minnesota, 2020), with a focus on the sixth chapter, "Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates."
Full bio at: https://phillipewegner.org
From University of Minnesota Press:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/invoking-hope
With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.
This is a book that banishes intellectual lethargy forever, so dazzling are the close readings that flesh out its world-scale philosophy and so forceful is its polemic—a polemic on behalf of knowledge itself as much as theory, commitment, and a responsibly grounded, even necessary, account of hope.
— Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary
With originality and humor, Phillip E. Wegner extends Fredric Jameson’s tradition of dialectically reappropriating formalisms, showing how even the most seemingly static structures can be deployed to think diachronically and reinvigorate our abilities to historicize. This fearless book is exactly what we need now.
— Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago
Invoking Hope is a major intervention by our leading theorist of utopia—a manifesto for the crisis of the present and the possibility of a better future. Drawing on a mix of Western Marxism and Badiou, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the necessity of a positive hermeneutics and the imagination of possible futures. In the Pandora’s box of the present, Wegner finds the hope that emerges last but promises everything.
— Christopher Breu, Illinois State University
Amanda Minervini teaches and researches in the department of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian Studies, and is the director of the Italian program, at Colorado College. Her research interests are in religion and politics, documentary, Holocaust representations, and political theory. She is the translator of Carlo Galli's Janus's Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt. Today we discuss her article titled, "Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism," forthcoming in M. Epstein, F. Orsitto, A. Righi's Tot Art: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-Society (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge: UK).
Audrey Wasser teaches French in the Department of French and Italian at Miami University. She is the author of The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (2016). We discuss her article titled, "Spinoza and the Claims of Meaning: 'A Word to the Wise'," published in Diacritics 47.2 (2019).
Hjalmar Falk is a researcher in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He is an intellectual historian specializing in modern social, legal, and political thought, historical conceptions of the relationship between politics and religion, and the intellectual history of secularity, with a particular focus on Carl Schmitt. We discuss his chapter titled, "Violence, Divine or Otherwise. Myth and Violence in the Benjamin-Schmitt Constellation," published in The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics,edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala, London, Routledge, 2018.
Dana Neacsu is a lecturer in law at Columbia University and a reference librarian at the Arthur W. Diamond Law Library. She also teaches Environmental Law and Policy at Barnard College. Her latest book, The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx and the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence (2020) is available through the Ebsco book collection for electronic purchase by institutional libraries. We discuss a few select chapters from this text.
Thumbnail image copyright: Calin Liviu Georgescu and Dana Neacsu
Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy, affiliated faculty at the School of International Affairs, and the Bioethics Program at Penn State University. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007). We discuss two of his articles, "The Axial Age, social evolution, and postsecular consciousness" (available through his page on Academia.edu) and his book review for Habermas' two-volume work translated as Also a History of Philosophy.
Miriam Fernández-Santiago teaches and researches literary theory, the literature of ethnic minorities in America, and the cultures of English-Speaking countries in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Granada. Her research interests range from Cultural and Intercultural Studies, Critical Theory, and North American Literature. We discuss her article under review titled, "A Post-human Revision of the Feminist Myth."
Galili Shahar is professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the Tel Aviv University. He researches and teaches German, Jewish and Hebrew literatures and classical Persian literature. He is director of the Minerva Institute for German History and head of the School of Cultural Studies at the Tel Aviv University. We discuss his article titled, "Lament and Being in Hebrew and German," easily accessible through his page on Academia.edu.
Alessandro Pelizzon teaches and researches in the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in Gold Coast, Australia, in the emerging field of Ecological Jurisprudence, with a focus on the right of nature, Wild Law, and Earth Jurisprudence. His main area of interest is the intersection between Earth Jurisprudence and different legal ontologies, with a particular focus on Indigenous legal structures. The text we are discussing today is his chapter titled, "Earth Laws, right of nature, and legal pluralism" published in Wild Law--In Practice, edited by Michelle Malloney and Peter Burdon, 2014. (Thumbnail photo credit goes to the editors as well.)
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is professor of Law and Theory and Director of The Westminster Law and Theory Lab in London. He researches in critical legal studies, autopoiesis, philosophy, art, theology and phenomenology, among others, and he is also a practicing artist, picpoet and fiction writer. We discuss his article titled, "Performing Metaphors," on the intersection between materiality of language, performativity, responsibility, contracts and bodies.
Marsha Bryant researches and writes about modernist studies, poetry and visual culture, women's writing, popular culture and pedagogy at the University of Florida. We discuss her article titled, "Everyday Ariel: Sylvia Plath and the Dream Kitchen" published in Women's Poetry and Popular Culture, 2011. We talk about everyday domesticity as an aesthetic in Plath's Ariel collection.