Book Review: Tamsin Jones, A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness

A review of Tamsin Jones, A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion

Who is Nikos Kazantzakis' God?

The work of Kazantzakis is saturated with theological language, but disagreement continues as to how such language is to be understood. In some readings, Kazantzakis is interpreted as a non-religious, or even anti-religious, writer who rejects or is skeptical towards belief in God; while other readings emphasize the deeply religious character of his writings, seeing in them a ‘post-Christian’ or postmodern development of traditional Christian concepts. Critics, however, have surprisingly neglected a promising proposal, which would bring to the fore Kazantzakis’s lifelong engagement with Eastern religion. This proposal, although not denying that Kazantzakis was influenced by many of the streams of thought identified by others (e.g., evolutionary theory, process philosophy, apophatic theology, etc.), holds that Kazantzakis’s most fundamental commitment lay with a monistic and idealist worldview, prominent in Eastern philosophy and religious thought, which conceives reality as a unified whole that is ultimately spiritual in nature

How to be an Agnostic

[Excerpt]In a famous trial in Dublin in 1937, Samuel Beckett took the stand in a libel case, not directed at him but rather at a local author, Oliver St. John Gogarty, for an antisemitic caricature he had recently made of Beckett’s Jewish relations. Gogarty’s barrister put the following question to Beckett: “Do you call yourself a Christian, Jew, or Atheist?” From the dock, Beckett replied: “None of the three.” To this extent, Beckett may be grouped with the ever-increasing number of today’s ‘nones’, those who regard themselves as ‘non-religious’, who are not affiliated with any religious tradition or community. It is primarily these nones to whom Schellenberg addresses his book. But what he seems to overlook is the distinctive, albeit unusual, way in which Beckett and many like him identify as religious ‘nones’. Beckett’s perspective on religion is notoriously difficult to categorise. And he is not unique in this respect: the world’s great writers tend to resist pigeonholes, especially with regard to religious belief. To ask, for example, whether Kafka was a theist is almost as illogical as many of the scenes depicted in his novels and short stories. Consider also Camus’ reaction to the frequent attempts made to label him an atheist: “I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet the words say nothing to me: for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” Even those who profess a fixed religious identity are often betrayed by their own writings. A good, albeit contested, example of this is Dostoevsky, whose affiliation with a quite conservative form of Christianity is well known, but who, at the same time, arguably undermined this very affiliation by putting forward some of the most powerful criticisms ever made against belief in God (for example, in the rebellious character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov)

The Suspect Arm

The room was pitch-dark, seemingly nonexistent, as he opened his eyes. Not even a trace of the dawn had yet made its way through the louvres. ‘That’s weird, for I got up so early,’ he thought. The entire right side of his body had gone numb, especially his arm, which appeared paralysed. ‘See, that’s what I get when I lie on my right side.’ He was always afraid of sleeping on the side of his heart, in case something happened and he never woke up again. And he liked thinking, in a somewhat smug way it must be said, about his desire to experience his own death. ‘There’s nothing more humiliating than to die while asleep,’ he had once written in a diary that he kept. ‘Kept’, in a manner of speaking, for the diary was a battered, 100-page exercise book which he remembered three or four times a year, and then he’d take the opportunity to put down on paper some of the thoughts that occasionally crossed his mind.The numbness had in some measure diminished. But what really sickened him lay in his mouth, which had the taste of a decayed piece of peel. ‘It’s best I read a little, that’s the only way I’ll fall asleep. Because if I’m late in the morning how will I handle the department head blowing his top.’ He switched the lamp on, and as he was now lying on his left-hand side, he leaned over with his right hand to grab a book from the bedside table. It seemed somewhat strange to him that he was struggling to make these movements. It was as though his arm was no longer obeying him. Eventually, after a few attempts, he took hold of the book, but as he went to lift it, it slipped from him and fell on the floor with a loud thud. He then looked at his arm. Had he not lost his voice from the shock, he would surely have screamed so loud that he would have woken up all the neighbours. His arm was scrawny, much shorter than his other arm, and furry all over. As for his fingers, they too had grown thin and were hideously bent like hooks at the end. He immediately thought: the arm of an ape! He tried to smile. ‘I must still be asleep. I must be dreaming. My dreams are always like that, nightmares, luckily I forget all about them in the morning.’ He switched off the lamp and closed his eyes. ‘You idiot. How can a human arm be transformed into the arm of an ape? You’re obviously asleep, or else you’re hallucinating.’ It was this latter alternative that he preferred. ‘Clearly it must be something like that, a mere hallucination which will disappear in time. Remember? It’s happened to you once or twice before. At one point, for an entire evening, you thought you were the head of the bank. You got up and looked in the mirror – you looked exactly like him. But when you sat down and rationally analysed the causes, you made the following discovery: you were envious of his position, of the esteem in which everyone held him, of his mien of respectability, whereas you were an insignificant accountant of the third rank. That’s what brought about the substitution. You got up in the morning perfectly well, you went to work and no one ever found out anything. Another time you thought that a dead woman was lying next to you in bed – even though you had gone to bed early all on your own. You investigated and again came upon the solution: all the women you had slept with – most of them prostitutes – had never given you what you had hoped to receive from them. You lay down on the bed in which you made love and got up from it with the same intolerable feeling of emptiness. That’s why you then saw the dead woman beside you

Who is Nikos Kazantzakis' God?

AbstractThe work of Kazantzakis is saturated with theological language, but disagreement continues as to how such language is to be understood. In some readings, Kazantzakis is interpreted as a non-religious, or even anti-religious, writer who rejects or is skeptical towards belief in God; while other readings emphasize the deeply religious character of his writings, seeing in them a ‘post-Christian’ or postmodern development of traditional Christian concepts. Critics, however, have surprisingly neglected a promising proposal, which would bring to the fore Kazantzakis’s lifelong engagement with Eastern religion. This proposal, although not denying that Kazantzakis was influenced by many of the streams of thought identified by others (e.g., evolutionary theory, process philosophy, apophatic theology, etc.), holds that Kazantzakis’s most fundamental commitment lay with a monistic and idealist worldview, prominent in Eastern philosophy and religious thought, which conceives reality as a unified whole that is ultimately spiritual in nature

Lived religion: Rethinking human nature in a neoliberal age

This article considers the relationship between philosophy of religion and an approach to the study of religion, which prioritises the experience of lived religion. Considering how individuals and communities live out their faith challenges some of the assumptions of analytic philosophers of religion regarding the position the philosopher should adopt when approaching the investigation of religion. If philosophy is understood principally as a means for analysing belief, it will have little space for an engagement with what it feels like to live out one’s faith

Polymorphisms in the glucocerebrosidase gene and pseudogene urge caution in clinical analysis of Gaucher disease allele c.1448T>C (L444P)

BACKGROUND: Gaucher disease is a potentially severe lysosomal storage disorder caused by mutations in the human glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA). We have developed a multiplexed genetic assay for eight diseases prevalent in the Ashkenazi population: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher type I, Niemann-Pick types A and B, mucolipidosis type IV, familial dysautonomia, Canavan, Bloom syndrome, and Fanconi anemia type C. This assay includes an allelic determination for GBA allele c.1448T>C (L444P). The goal of this study was to clinically evaluate this assay. METHODS: Biotinylated, multiplex PCR products were directly hybridized to capture probes immobilized on fluorescently addressed microspheres. After incubation with streptavidin-conjugated fluorophore, the reactions were analyzed by Luminex IS100. Clinical evaluations were conducted using de-identified patient DNA samples. RESULTS: We evaluated a multiplexed suspension array assay that includes wild-type and mutant genetic determinations for Gaucher disease allele c.1448T>C. Two percent of samples reported to be wild-type by conventional methods were observed to be c.1448T>C heterozygous using our assay. Sequence analysis suggested that this phenomenon was due to co-amplification of the functional gene and a paralogous pseudogene (ΨGBA) due to a polymorphism in the primer-binding site of the latter. Primers for the amplification of this allele were then repositioned to span an upstream deletion in the pseudogene, yielding a much longer amplicon. Although it is widely reported that long amplicons negatively impact amplification or detection efficiency in recently adopted multiplex techniques, this assay design functioned properly and resolved the occurrence of false heterozygosity. CONCLUSION: Although previously available sequence information suggested GBA gene/pseudogene discrimination capabilities with a short amplified product, we identified common single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the pseudogene that required amplification of a larger region for effective discrimination