To invoke the notion of “eternality” might seem, in our post-Enlightenment yet scientifically situated culture, to recur to an outdated philosophical or theological moment. In this paper I will argue that the concept of eternality is worth revisiting precisely insofar as it might elicit some insights into the character of reality that neither dismiss nor passively accept the legacy of Enlightenment philosophy and science’s proclamations on reality, time and space. Instead, I aim to use the notions of eternality (and of colors) to put into question the very divisions between reality and its qualities that infuse our culture of thought....

The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has only recently begun to receive considerable attention in the English-speaking world. Over the past ten years or so, many of his most significant texts have been translated into English, and his philosophy as a whole has been the subject of a growing body of commentary and criticism, including several book-length introductions and edited volumes. In the most general terms, Badiou’s project, at least since the publication of his first magnum opusBeing and Event, can be understood as an attempt to construct a contemporary systematic philosophy, the parameters of which revolve around...

Søren Kierkegaard, a seemingly unlikely interlocutor for theopoetic discourse, and indeed not here wholly folded into this emergent school of thought, nonetheless shared with this contemporary movement a resistance to the hegemonic claims of enlightenment rationality. Against the monolithic historical dialectic posited by Hegel, Kierkegaard emerged as a voice of individualism, his emphasis on the individual and the process of selfhood affirming that, as Mark C. Taylor says, “he holds spiritlessness to arise from the dissipation of individual selfhood created by abstract reflection.”¹ Rather than seek to encounter spirit on a societal scale, Kierkegaard seeks to draw forth a resurgence...

The topic of theopoetics provides the occasion for reflecting upon irrepressible and irreducible differences,¹ but also upon unexplored and indeed previously unremarked conjunctions. So I want to seize this occasion as an opportunity to juxtapose theology and the blues, thereby considering a possibility, one itself of possibly broad and deep significance. Specifically, I want to consider theology as a genre of the blues. While certain forms of the blues unquestionably have their roots in theology,² theology itself draws from the sources and arguably inspiration of various dimensions of human experience (our experienceofandinthe world).³

No less than...

Transcending the obvious is not always an analytical prerogative. Progress in speculative areas of thought is sometimes best begun with poetry. Why? Because progressive thought typically requires one to step outside of the comfort zones of “known” and “obvious” truths or tried and true methods. This needn’t mean that one abandons reason for relativism; rather, it admits that one may successfully transcend the obvious by speaking in a transformative way that resonates with one’s audience. Sophistry aside, this sort of transformative rhetoric can call for many things; for Alfred North Whitehead and much of process theology, it called for new...

Roland Faber is insistent that “theopoetics is about multiplicity!”¹ Of the many meanings of multiplicity that Faber explores, two are helpful to note at the start. First, he fights against the reduction of process theology to a single Whiteheadian orthodoxy. In this paper and elsewhere, I support that effort by working to keep alive creative dialogue between various theistic and nontheistic visions of God and the World. Secondly, Faber also urges us to resist any reduction of God to One, to “God as being ‘someone’ creating, a ‘self’ being subject of self-creativity, a ‘force-field’ of creativity, a ‘divine’ matrix—and...

“I understood love to be the very gravity holding each leaf, each cell, this earthy star together.”¹ This concluding line from a prose piece by Joy Harjo follows, as a kind of explanatory note, on a longer poem entitled “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” That longer piece is Harjo’s version of one of the most widely shared narratives by the same name of the eastern woodlands Native peoples of North America. Harjo’s poem is more than a restatement or interpretation of an original. It is a storied response to a particular present, a specific time and place. Among...

In this paper I argue that radical theology is only possible as theopoetics, where theopoetics means a poetics of the event contained in the name of God.

The first step is to show that theology, by which I mean at the start confessional theology, is inevitably delimited and displaced by radical theology. To see why this is so, let us distinguish between religious actors and theological reflection. The actors belong to a first-order operation of religious beliefs and practices. Some of these practices are cultic in which, as Hegel says, the community deepens its sense of a common spirit, its...

All across the spectrum of religious thought, theologians and lay people alike fall victim to the pitfalls of a position that presupposes that a “correct form of belief and practice” (orthodoxy) will always manifest as a “uniformity of belief and practice” (monorthodoxy).¹ Conversely, I suggest that there is nothing that necessitates the collapse of those two positions into one, and I offer that there is another stance that actively insists on the reality of truth while maintaining the present provisionality ofall interpretationsconcerning the ultimate, challenging any assertion that right practice always requires same practice.

This chapter will attempt...

The idea of the “sublime” is widespread in aesthetics and philosophy today. Indeed, it may—as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests—have maintained its popularity for several centuries, as “a fashion that has persisted uninterruptedly into our own time from the beginnings of modernity.”¹ The sublime, as modified by Kant and the Romantics, has become a cipher in our late modern period for what brings thought, reason, or beauty into question. It goes under such other names as “the void” (Jacques Lacan), “difference” (Jacques Derrida), “chaos” (Gilles Deleuze), “otherness” (Emmanuel Levinas), infinity, or even death (Freud). The “sublime” in recent thought is...

Do we really want to trade process theology for processtheopoetics? Doesn’t the irreplaceable value of process theology lie in its capacity to get in there and argue with classical theism, to expose the fallacies of an imbricated metaphysics of substance and formulate firm doctrinal alternatives? A theopoetic priority may be subtly pursued, of course, with poetic indirection, and without any polemical opposition of the poetic to the rational. It may even de-emphasize thepoetryof poetics. But won’t itipso factosoften that confident, counterorthodox process lucidity? And thereby weaken its voiceastheology? Certainly the more rationalist among...

Alfred North Whitehead famously describes God as the “poet of the world” in the context of offering an alternative to traditional theological doctrines of creation that consider the world a mere product of unilateral divine will or presence.¹ A process approach totheopoetics, then, will inherently subvert any account of aesthetic expression in which the latter is considered no more than a derivative effect of some preordained divine plan or purpose. In other words, to attribute to God this role of cosmological poet is to affirm a plurality of indeterminate, self-creative agencies in the world whose aim at aesthetic richness...

John Muir, the wholehearted naturalist who was instrumental in the creation of the first modern national park worldwide, Yellowstone, in the Northwest of the United States, understood the preserves of nature we create as ways to grant nature our absence. It is only when we recognize and experience the wildness of mountains, waters, and woods that we can perceive their own ways of being, beating in their own rhythms. In recognizing thatweare the intruders, the foreigners, the strangers, we are granted the feeling of our own contingency within the necessity of wildness in return.¹ Nothing is just for...

When I was a young seminarian, my first encounter with Alfred North Whitehead proved to be jarring—and not (just) because of the daunting complexity of his vision and writing. When I first read Whitehead’s assertion “God is an actual entity,”¹ my reaction was one of stark aversion. My first thought was, “You cannot say that!” What prompted this allergic response? My best guess is that I found Whitehead’s discourse out of keeping with the texture of theological speech I imbibed while growing up within the high liturgical milieu of the Mar Thoma Church. This Whiteheadian dictum seemed alien to...