John Caputo is one of my favorite philosophers of religion. His writing is delightfully playful and creative as well as deeply profound and insightful.
For an extended review of his latest book The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, see the Theo-Blogger tour, which covers each chapter in turn.
Instead of trying to duplicate that impressive effort, the following are some passages that I tweeted as I read the book because they particularly stood out to me as significant:
“I do not believe in the existence of God but in God’s insistence…. God insists, while we exist.” #WeaknessOfGod
“I am trying to open thinking & practice to the event that is playing itself out under the name of God.”
“Risk w/o safety net, call w/o identifiable source, clear command or guaranteed response — insistence w/o existence” #ReligionWithoutReligion
“You get the atheism you deserve, depending on the theism you are serving up.” #Projection/#Projectile
“Can’t you say everything you want to say by talking about ‘Being’ & ‘finitude,’ and never bringing up religion? I could.”
“Hegel is the grandfather and Tillich the father of radical theology & of the new species of theologians for which I am calling.”
“In theopoetics, everything turns on *rejecting* supernaturalism…. Demythologized & re-poeticized in a poetics of the
“The several religions differ from one another in ways that are broadly similar to the ways that languages differ from one another.”
“No more sense to ask what is the true religion than what is the true language…different vocabularies doing different things.”
“If God is taken to be an entity, the right religious and theological reply is atheism.”
“Dogmatic atheistic metaphysics have a tin ear for religion…like computer geeks trying to understand poetry.”
“The treatment is over when patient accepts the nonexistence of the big Other. Holy Spirit is the community w/o the big Other” #Lacan/#Žižek
“The secret is, there is no Secret, no big Other who has the Secret.” #Derrida/#Deconstruction (A/theology)
“The call is not work of a Prime Caller, but ‘get itself called’ in the middle voice…like Žižek’s auto-formative collective.”
“In Greek, the middle voice signifies a reflexive action that begins and ends with the subject: ‘I give myself time to deliberate.’”
“I strike a position b/w supernaturalism, which annuls human activity, & pure anthopologism, which makes everything human doing.”
“Milbank: in the beginning was the Word & everything will be fine. Žižek: in the beginning was the Void & nothing will be fine.”
“Only things that can be valued are mortal/finite/temporal…impermanence is the condition under which we hold them dear” #NihilismOfGrace
“My entire idea is to reclaim religion as an event of this world…religion for the world & the world for religion.” #MundaneGrace
The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a trained spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).
Learn more about Unitarian Universalism:
http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles
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