On July 2, 2000, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, deferred action on the petition to have Dietrich Bonhoeffer named a righteous gentile. My contention is that critics of this decision conceal a more pernicious difficulty that arises in Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran legacy. David Nirenberg's recent Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, demonstrates the history and development of such categories with particular attention to Luther. What goes unnoticed is the ongoing operations of anti-Judaism in later theologians such as Bonhoeffer. Although Bonhoeffer may not have been anti-Semitic, the degree to which his theology remained bound to centuries old anti-Judaism is another matter. Download the full article here.

This essay advances an interpretation of early Christian codex books, which goes beyond Catherine Pickstock’s critique of Jacques Derrida. Firstly, it summarizes Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato’s Phaedrus and introduces his understanding of writing as différance. Secondly, it outlines Pickstock’s After Writing in order to understand her emphasis upon the liturgical nature of platonic dialogue. It is here that an ambiguity emerges between writing and codex books in Pickstock’s account. In response, the insights of book historians such as Roger Chartier will be brought to bear in order to understand the longer history of the codex, which sees the printing press as a continuation of the early transition from roll to codex in the second century of the Common Era. It has long been noted that Christians of this period were early and pervasive adopters of codex binding for their sacred literature. By summarizing the reasons why, it will be shown how the codex expressed early Christian religious concerns. Download the full article here.

Increasingly, religion is being studied in numerous disciplines across universities today, and the following chapters embrace this diversity with particular attention to processes of secularization. Moreover, the focus on Australian history, culture, and legal sources is intended to broaden international debate on varieties of secularization and new visibilities of religion. The result is not a settled set of conclusions concerning the concept of religion, a postsecular age, nor a triumphalist tone regarding religion’s end or resurgence. Rather, the essays are intended to note the nuances, trace the developments, and often leave open key themes that require further research. If readers consider these arguments carefully, then patience will be required to understand disciplines that are not one’s own, as well as political cultures that we may or may not share. The hope, however, is that such patience will result in not only a better understanding of the current state of religion after secularization but also new research directions for the future. Download the full chapter here.

Although the question of religion did not feature prominently in Jürgen Habermas’s early political theory, his more recent work has continuously addressed the topic. This later interest in religion is grounded in what one commentator in a volume on The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, cited as the urgent need to integrate religious voices in the workings of public reason in order to avoid social disharmony and to thwart potential violence. However, the following paper argues that the hermeneutic procedures Habermas develops for the public sphere cannot bear the weight that his later understanding of religion demands of them. Such an insight validates Paul Ricoeur’s earlier argument that Habermas’s “depth hermeneutics,” were themselves utopic in nature. It is from this vantage point that a return to Ricoeur's thought is justified, through which a more productive understanding of the public potential of religious discourse can be understood. Download the full chapter here.

In 1933 Frederic Kenyon was one of the first to note the early Christian addiction to codex books. As later scholars confirmed, Christian communities reproduced their sacred literature in a way that differed from the largely scrolled Greco-Roman as well as Jewish bibliographic cultures of the first centuries of the Common Era. Book historians and scholars of biblical literature alike have developed a range of competing theories in order to better understand this peculiarity. By evaluating their claims, a number of clarifications can be made in order to demonstrate the codex's sensitivity to Jewish scribal practices as well as its capacity to include a cosmopolitan diversity of texts. Through these clarifications the codex book form itself can provide vital interpretative insights into early biblical literature and the longer history of the book today. Download the full article here.

The film A Serious Man cinematically deconstructs the life of a mid-twentieth century, mid-western American physics professor named Larry Gopnik. As it happens, Larry is up for tenure with a wife who is about to leave him, an unemployed brother who sleeps on his couch, and two self-obsessed teenage children. The film presents a Job-like theodicy in which the mysteries of quantum physics are haunted by questions of good and evil and the spectre of an un-named God. Just as Newtonian physics underwrote Kant’s evocation of the image of starry skies above and moral law within, quantum physics underwrites a new set of ethical anxieties, which the film narrates as a key facet of contemporary western culture’s re-enchantment. Although some, such as Slavoj Zizek, see this as a positively charged opportunity to rethink metaphysics and ethics, the film leaves the audience with more sinister conclusions. Download the full article here.

Barth consistently comments on Kant's importance for his early thought in his autobiographical sketches, letters, and even more explicitly in his 1930 lectures on Kant in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Interestingly, however, little attention has been paid to these latter lectures in the secondary literature. In part, this oversight is due to the manner in which Barth's theology has been thought to overcome Kant's influence much earlier on in his intellectual development. Hence, although commentators such as Merold Westphal, Simon Fisher and Bruce McCormack have developed keen interest in Kant's influence upon Barth's early work, even engaging Barth's Neo-Kantian context in great detail, my contention is that Barth's later interpretation of Kant is crucial and gives further insight into Barth's legacy for contemporary thought today. After Kant, Barth did not abandonment or disregard the metaphysical question of being, but rather, faced it all the more rigorously. Download the full article here.

What is the nature of Barth's development over the 1920s? Barth himself understood this period as his “apprenticeship,” and cites his 1931 book on Anselm as a significant juncture in moving beyond this stage in his thinking. Barth's emphasis upon both change and continuity lies at the heart of the discrepancy between two prominent interpreters of his theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bruce McCormack. On the surface it appears as though their disagreement centers around Barth's employment of dialectic and analogy in his theology. However, my thesis is that this focus conceals the ontological strategies Barth's multifarious uses of analogy and dialectic always implied. By looking past McCormack and Balthasar's respective periodizations of Barth's development, a clearer focus upon Barth's theological ontology can begin to take place. Download the full article here.