Questioning God (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) [Paperback]

John D. Caputo (Editor), Mark Dooley (Editor), Michael J. Scanlon (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2001 | Series: Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion

In 15 insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars of religion explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as non-patriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context.

Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward.

Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John D. Caputo is David R. Cook Chair of Philosophy at Villanova University. He is author of More Radical Hermeneutics; The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida; Against Ethics; and Radical Hermeneutics. He is co-editor (with Michael J. Scanlon) of God, the Gift, and Postmodernism.

Mark Dooley is John Henry Newman Scholar in Theology at University College, Dublin. He is author of The Politics of Exodus and From Aquinas to Derrida.

Michael J. Scanlon is Josephine C. Connelly Chair of Christian Theology at Villanova University. His articles have appeared in Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings, New Theology Review, and Augustinian Studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (September 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253214742
• ISBN-13: 978-0253214744
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,753,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John D. Caputo, the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion (Syracuse University) is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who works in the area of radical theology. Prof. Caputo is working on a theory of "theo-poetics," by which he means a poetics of the "event" harbored in the name of God, a notion that depends upon a reworking of the notions of event in Derrida and Deleuze. 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." His notion of the weakness of God, an expression that needs to be interpreted carefully by following what he means by "event," is reducible neither to an orthodox notion of kenosis nor to a death of God theology (Altizer, Zizek), although it bears comparison to both. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in "On Religion," "Philosophy and Theology," and "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" and has an interest in interacting with working church groups like Ikon and the Emergent Church. He is currently working in a book on the weakness of our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled "The Fate of all Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II." At Syracuse, Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, which means both working on radical approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and tracking down the traces of radical religious and theological motifs in contemporary continental philosophy.