Thanatos and the Passion for Transformation

In this paper I shall restrict myself to an exploration of three theoretical accounts of violence that have been offered in relation to religion, with specific reference to the question of how that violence could be transformed. What is the relationship between creativity and violence? How does newness enter the world, the newness that is needed if there is to be transformation of the violence of the present world order? None of the thinkers whose ideas of violence I shall consider has much to say about beauty or creativity. However, I shall argue that although beauty is ignored in their work, just as it has regularly been pushed to the margins in the Bible, andin the theology of Christendom, it still offers a place of resistance from which violence can be challenged. In the final section of this paper I shall begin an exploration of what that entails

Choose Life! Early Quaker Women and Violence in Modernity

The peace testimony of the early Quakers was developed in a context where war, killing and death were a major preoccupation. In this article I show how Margaret Fell and other early Quaker women encouraged a choice of life rather than a preoccupation with death. While both women and men Friends developed the peace testimony, in the case of the men, the language of war (albeit the \u27Lamb\u27s War\u27) was retained, while many women (though not all) looked for language that was more nurturing and less violent. I suggest that it is the radical choice of life, not just the renunciation of violence, that is ultimately central to the peace testimony, especially in relation to its emphasis on justice and flourishing

Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities

The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the ‘name of God’ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben’s work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of ‘absolute’ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings

"The End of Immortality!" Eternal Life and the Makropulos Debate

Responding to a well-known essay by Bernard Williams, philosophers (and a few theologians) have engaged in what I call “the Makropulos debate,” a debate over whether immortality—“living forever”—would be desirable for beings like us. Lacking a firm conceptual grounding in the religious contexts from which terms such as “immortality” and “eternal life” gain much of their sense, the debate has consisted chiefly in a battle of speculative fantasies. Having presented my four main reasons for this assessment, I examine an alternative and neglected conception, the idea of eternal life as a present possession, derived in large part from Johannine Christianity. Without claiming to argue for the truth of this conception, I present its investigation as exemplifying a conceptually fruitful direction of inquiry into immortality or eternal life, one which takes seriously the religious and ethical surroundings of these concepts