In praise of titles

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More credit is probably due to literature and rhetoric scholars than philosophers for impressing upon me the importance of a text’s rhetorical form and prose style. My philosophical training primed me to concentrate on a work’s contents. This was largely a matter of targeting assessment at the plausibility of premises, the validity of inferences, the soundness of conclusions — basically its operating model of rational argumentation. Now don’t get me wrong, of course I still think there’s value in attending to these sorts of details. It’s a defining purpose of philosophy, after all, to equip its students with the know-how needed to project the discipline’s apparatus of judgment into any given circumstance. (That is, to learn how to carry on its kind of conversation, as it were, no matter the company.) But there can be a downside to limiting one’s focus to this angle of criticism alone, to nourishing oneself on what I now take for an incomplete diet. For one risks losing touch with other sensitivities, other categories of praise and critique, deployed in the conceptual apparatuses other disciplines traffic in as their matter of course. That downside is the shrinking of the capaciousness of one’s own critical sensibilities.

All this just to say that I’ve learned that how an author pitches their voice is not an extraneous detail, mere decoration incidental to what is really being said. So, to correct this oversight, I wanted to take some time to register this lesson to be mindful of the persuasive powers latent in the aesthetic features of texts (philosophical, theological, and other). As Nicholas Lash said it, and said it simpler and better than I have: in the case of theology, “God’s beauty is not well served by ugly prose.”

To illustrate something of the above I’d like to single out a particular literary moment of texts easy to look past, namely, titles. I think a memorable title does more work than we might at first think. Here, then, are some of the titles that once gave my imagination pause when I first happened upon them and have stayed with me ever since.

  • The Joy of Being Wrong (by James Alison)
  • Suffering Divine Things (Reinhard Hutter)
  • No Handle on the Cross: Meditations on the Crucified Mind (Kosuke Koyama)
  • Solved by Sacrifice (Robert MacSwain)
  • A Community Called Atonement (Scot McNight)
  • Christ the Stranger (Ben Myers)
  • A Ray of Darkness (Rowan Williams)
  • The Wound of Knowledge (Rowan Williams)

Whether the contents of these works sustained the curiosity these titles piqued, though, is a question for another time. For my purposes here, that’s beside the point.

Raimond Gaita on philosophical points of departure

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Raimond Gaita on philosophical points of departure I wish to offer a starting-point for reflection — philosophical reflection — on absolute value; not the starting point, not even a starting-point unproblematically within the subject, but a starting-point partly from outside the subject. I do not wish to prejudge the relation between reflection within the subject and reflection […]

Theology and the Humanities

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Given theology’s share of discontinuities with the natural sciences, it might be thought to follow that theology is better classified among either the social sciences or, more likely, the humanities. It’s not an unreasonable inference. When you get down to it, it’s not easy to pinpoint how the procedures of theology differ from those of, say, philosophy, history, literary studies, interpretive anthropology, others could be listed. Nevertheless, I don’t think this is quite right. For one, the humanities take as their object of study (as the label suggests) humanity, i.e., its nature, condition, perspective, what-have-you. Theology, however, while of course having an interest in humanity, has for its primary subject matter God. The reason theology takes an interest in humanity, that is, is because of humanity’s relation to God, or better, because God has taken an interest in humanity. This is why I am tempted to think of theology as an enterprise sui generis, something distinguishable from both the sciences and humanities. I want to say that seminaries in the US, whether deliberately or not, are instructive here in virtue of their convention of granting M.Div. degrees, masters of divinity, and not of either sciences or humanities.

Of course, though, the true story is going to be more complex than my recounting has rendered it. For one complication, consider Calvin’s ever-so-suggestive remark that opens his Institutes: “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other [emphasis added]. The knowledge of God and of humanity, studies divine and humane, are intimately intertwined. While the knowledge of humanity Calvin has in mind here is more likely an already-theologically-laden anthropology, I still want to hear him as hinting to an opportunity for theology, as inviting theology to consider its relation to the humanities proper. To that end, here’s a list of readings, for anyone interested, that take up the nature and powers of humane studies in general and, more specifically, the question of theology’s interest in the humanities:

  • Christopher Brittain and Francesca Murphy, eds. Theology, University, Humanities: Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini, (Wipf&Stock, 2011).
  • Davies, Crisp, D’Costa, Hampson, eds., Christianity and the Disciplines: The Transformation of the University, (T&TClark, 2014).
  • Ford, Quash, and Soskice, eds., Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-first Century, (Cambridge UnivPr, 2012).
  • Gordon Graham, “Human Nature and the Study of the Humanities,” in Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education, (Imprint Academic, 2007), 171-184.
  • Jenann Ismael, “Why (Study) the Humanities? The View from Science,” in Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Ed. Grimm, (Oxford Uni. Pr, 2018), 177-193.
  • Roger Scruton, “Scientism and the Humanities,” in Scientism: The New Orthodoxy (Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • Peter Hacker, “Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding,” in Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies, (OUP, 2001), 34-73.
  • Pete Ward, ed., Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, (Eerdmans, 2012).
  • John Webster, “Regina artium: Theology and the Humanities,” in The Domain of the Word, (Bloomsbury, 2012), 171-192.
  • Rowan Williams, “Theology among the Humanities,” in The Vocation of Theology Today, edited by Greggs, Muers, & Zahl, (Cascade, 2013), 178-192.

Readings on Scientism

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How does one register the possibility that the sciences may exceed their epistemic competencies without coming across as altogether anti-science? Theologians (and philosophers and humanities scholars) can be received with suspicion when they try to suggest that our proper esteem for the sciences has its limits. When concerns to this effect are voiced by theologians in particular, though, they’re all too quickly mistaken for back-door campaigns for some form of religiously motivated scientific revisionism (e.g., creationism), even when such machinations are in no way part of their intentions. The sad result is that legitimate concerns about the place of the sciences in contemporary culture, and the reach of their explanatory power, go unheard. (And to be sure, thereby hurting the practice of the sciences as much as other disciplines). In contrast to this trend, what I think would make for a positive change of pace would be a more frank discussion of the potential the sciences harbor for crowding out non-scientific forms of cognitive discourse — that is, that it would become ingredient to accounts of the status and achievements of the sciences that they also make it a point to alert us to the live threat of scientism. If you’d care to, you can follow up on this topic in works like these:

Readings on the history of ‘religion’ as an analytic category

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There’s a thesis building steam of late that our notion of ‘religion’ is in need of some rinsing in historicist acids. What I have in mind here is not to be confused with anti-realist claims to the effect that, say, God is nothing more than a social construction. Rather, the thought goes that it’s about time we begin to question the supposition that the term ‘religion’ identifies a valid genus which can count among its species the likes of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. ‘Religion,’ too, that is, like so many other categories basic to modern Western societies, we should by now not be surprised to learn, has a history. The term has not always labeled what it labels today, raising the question of whether the realities so depicted are best served under this description. Again, we’re not talking here about the contents of particular religions, but merely the reigning categorial apparatus scholars use to specify a possible object of study. If this is sounding like a thesis that may be of any interest, you can follow it up — in various permutations — in works like the following:

(For Extra Credit): Selected theological approaches to the category ‘Religion’