Audio updated February, 2nd 2013. – APS
You may download an mp3 of the complete three hour session of the 2011 AAR Theology and Continental Philosophy Group session “The Secular and the Speculative: Exploring Themes from Anthony Paul Smith’s and Daniel Whistler’s After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion”. (Apologies for not being able to include it on the page itself, but it was too large a file for any of the free services offered.) Speakers include AUFS authors Bradley Johnson, Daniel Whistler, and Daniel Colucciello Barber, as well as Rocco Gangle. We also have a new AUFS contributor, Joshua Ramey, as a respondent alongside of Ken Surin. I presided and made a short response to the responses at the end.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me the panel felt good. Many of us in this group have been self-valorizing, with our intellectual friendships and engagements with one another, but with this panel it felt like some Big Other, who of course didn’t attend the session, had finally recognized us as well. There was little engagement from the main theological targets of critique (namely the new apocalypticists like Nate Kerr and Radical Orthodoxists), but perhaps that critique was always spoken in a language they could never understand. What did happen, however, was a great discussion with secular theologians and Catholic philosopher-theologians as well as a debate between the panelists themselves. I hope you all enjoy the recording and consider it a holiday present of some sort. Not unlike the socks that you end up liking quite a bit anyway.
It really was an excellent session, a fitting conclusion to my abbreviated AAR.
thanks for putting this up, it was an excellent session.
We often speak about the Platonic ideal of an edited volume or panel having a kind of flow, versus just being self-serving voices that happen to occupy the same space. Seldom does it happen. & while I’m certainly biased, I’m also somewhat self-loathing, so it doesn’t seem too unseemly to say I think the panel achieved something very close to the ideal.
It was a great panel and I have found the book to be extremely interesting.