Catholicity of the Codex Book (2010-14)
Search is a feature on almost every software application we use today, and it explains why a much older information technology has returned along with it, the scroll. Of course the scroll does not return in the precise manner as the ancient papyrus rolls of antiquity, but rather, it gives a crucial clue to the longer history of information technology which precedes our digital era. It is this longer history that Roger Chartier notes in his Forms and Meanings, that the only real parallel to today’s digital “revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word… [is] the substitution of the codex for the volumen - of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll.” Although not specifically interested in the scrolls of today, Chartier’s expertise in the longer history of the codex allows him to see that cyberspace marks a radicalization of information technology that goes well beyond the innovation of the printing press. His point, however, is that if we are to understand the return of the scroll today we must look back to the rise of the bound pages of the codex roughly 1800 years ago.
At the moment, my research theologically interrogates the transition from scrolls to the codex book form in the third and fourth centuries of the common era, a transition intimately bound up with the rise of Christianity itself. What concerns me here is the manner in which this technological development gives insight into western philosophical notions of access, universalism, canonicity and cosmopolitanism. My dialogue partners in this analysis take my past work on Barth and Heidegger in new directions with Jacques Derrida on the (a)metaphysical nature of writing, and Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek with reference to St. Paul’s universalism. A book, loosely titled Catholicity after Codex, is aimed at publication in early 2014.
Publications and Presentations
“Canon after Codex,” Paper presented at the American Academy of Religion 2010 Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, October 30 - November 2, 2010.
“The Return of the Scroll: From Codex to Google,” Paper presented at the Valuing Theological Education Conference, St. Stephen’s House, The University of Oxford, January 4-6, 2010.
New Visibility of Religion in Political Life (2006-Ongoing)
My research on the new visiblity of religion in political life was inspired by my association with the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, led by Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl. It now continues at the Group for Religion and Intellectual Traditions at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Currently, religion and globalization seem to be working towards opposite ends. As Mark Juergensmeyer has noted in Religion and Global Civil Society, while religiously invoked terrorism fragments society, the Internet, cell phones and the media industry foster the formation of an increasingly global social fabric. But religion is not a single faceted phenomenon. As much as there have been prophets of violence such as Osama bin Laden, there have been prophets of peace and reconciliation such as Bishop Desmond Tutu. How a civil society might be configured in relation to the inherent ambiguity surrounding religious traditions remains difficult to discern.
My research in this area has analysed the structure of Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere which maintains that democratic societies must be open to all. As Craig Calhoun recently summed up in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, “It is imperative to include religious citizens both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of urgent practicality. Religiously informed actors… matter so much in contemporary political life that we endanger the future of the democratic polity if we cannot integrate them into the workings of public reason.” My research has thus far interrogated the problematic and paradoxical tensions which emerge from Habermas’s understanding of public reason. In this regard I began a constructive dialogue with the political nature of Karl Barth’s theology. As well, I continue to speak and teach on the contemporary new visibility of religion within political culture today, and blog on it here.
Publications and Presentations
“Karl Barth and Jürgen Habermas: Transcendental Aporias of Global Civil Society.” Political Theology vol. 9, no. 4 (September, 2008): 477-502.
“Karl Barth and Jürgen Habermas: Christian Mission and Global Civil Society,” Paper presented at The American Academy of Religion 2006 Annual Conference, Washington, DC, November 18-21, 2006.
“From Habermas to Barth and Back Again.” Journal of Church and State vol. 48, no. 1 (Winter, 2006): 101-126
Radio Panelist for a “Sunday Breakfast Discussion of Religion in American Politics,” BBC Greater Manchester Radio FM 95.1, November 7, 2004.
Protestant Metaphysics (2004-09)
What is the legacy of the Greek metaphysical tradition for Protestant Christianity? Two of the most influential twentieth century thinkers to answer this question are Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. However, the relationship between their work remains ambiguous within contemporary scholarship. My research challenges both an oversimplified conflation of Barth and Heidegger’s thought as well as the pretense that an (a)theist philosopher and dogmatic theologian have little to say to each other. The result of this juxtaposition is a clear articulation of two different ways of refiguring the historically problematic relationship between metaphysics and theology after the Protestant Reformation. Whereas Heidegger interpreted Luther in a way which ultimately led to a divorce between metaphysics and theology, Barth saw Luther as the progenitor of a non-foundationalist affirmation of the being of God. In either case the boundaries between theology and philosophy were radically reconfigured in ways which continue to dominate both disciplines to this day. Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger has been published in June of 2010 by SCM Press, and has been released in the US under the imprint of Wipf & Stock.
Publications and Presentations
“Barth after Kant.” Modern Theology (Forthcoming, 2012)
“Why Protestant Metaphysics Today?” Paper presented at the Theology Research Seminar in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, April 21, 2010.
“Before Analogy: Recovering Barth’s Ontological Development.” New Blackfriars vol. 90, no. 1029 (September, 2009): 577-601.
“One Trinity, One Election, One Jesus: Seinsweise in Barth’s Theology,” Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Theology Annual Conference 2009, Kontakt der Kontinenten, Utrecht, The Netherlands, March 30 - April 2, 2009.
“Returning Barth to Anselm.” Modern Theology vol. 24, no. 3 (July, 2008): 413-437. *
“Heidegger on Luther on Paul.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2007): 41-45.*
“The Post-Ontological Paul?” Paper presented at The Society of Biblical Literature 2006 Annual Conference, Washington, DC, November 18-21, 2006.
“Barth’s Prolegomena to Any Future Protestant Metaphysics which Can Possibly Pretend to Be a Science,” Paper presented at Belief and Metaphysics, The Centre of Philosophy and Theology in partnership with the Instituto de Filosofia Edith Stein de Granada, Granada, Spain, September 15-18, 2006.
“Heidegger’s Hidden Theology: Revisiting Martin Luther’s Influence upon Martin Heidegger,” Paper presented at the 16th Conference of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion, Tübingen, Germany, September 1-4, 2006.
Surveillance and the Eye of God (2004-06)
On the one hand, surveillance is nothing new and rooted in modern western democratic culture, as Foucault helpfully pointed out. However, the information electronic age has given surveillance new forms and modes of power which require further reflection. In particular, I’m interested in the ways in which the eye of the surveillance camera is rooted in older notions of the eye of God in western political culture. I wrote my Master of Arts thesis on this area and plan to return to this topic towards the end of 2013.
Christian theology has long sought to systematize how it is that God is everywhere while maintaining that God is not in fact everything. In medieval theology, “the attribute of omnipresence had to be differentiated from Christ’s presence and the presence of the Holy Ghost—but not too much. It had to be guarded from pantheistic interpretations, but also from elimination by excessive emphasis on God’s being nowhere.”[1] An example of this balance can be found in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.[2] Thomas argued for God’s eternal ubiquity in light of “the presence of God at all places, the presence of angels in some places, and the presence of Christ’s body in the Host.”[3] He accomplished his task through Aristotelian categories, making a distinction between essence and existence such that a hierarchy of being could be established where the closer a thing got to God the more it depended upon God for its existence.[4] In so doing he found a way to relate God to this world taking account of the omnipresent being of God in light of the being of everything else.
Interestingly, arguments for the omnipresence of God in theology had political roots as well. In medieval politics, “the king, otherwise an individual man, is in officio the type and image of the Anointed in heaven and therewith of God.”[5] The king ruled both as a natural body, but also as a political body which functioned in an omnipresent way. The theological and the political were linked and made sense in light of each other in this era. However, this raises the question all the more profoundly for today’s varieties of secularism, and perceived separations between church and state. What then are the implications of the history of the west’s political theology for today’s (ex)urban surveillance centres?
Publications and Presentations
“Urban Surveillance: The Hidden Costs of Disneyland.” International Journal of the Humanitiesvol. 3, no. 8 (Fall, 2006).
“Urban Surveillance: From Concentration Camps to Disneyland,” Paper presented at The Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, University of Cambridge, August 2-5, 2005. Re-presented at The Fourth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities, Renaissance Ilikai Waikiki Hotel, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 11-14, 2006.
“Cyber-Space of Possibles,” Paper presented at The Cyberspace 2005 Conference, Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, November 7-8, 2005.
“Redeeming the Icons.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2005): 39-62.
[1] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 49
[2] See in particular I q.8 a.3 and I q.4 a.3
[3] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. 50
[4] Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.,: Princeton University Press, 1957). 48
[5] For a more detailed description of the way the king’s two bodies functioned in medieval politics see Ibid. 85-6