Author: Marika Rose

Miraculous & Extremely Fragile: A Theology of Failure Book Event response

~ Marika Rose

In my book, I argue that for Žižek there is a difference between love according to desire, which is ‘to believe in a false vision of purity and perfection’, suppressing and disavowing the inconsistencies and imperfections of the one beloved; and love according to drive which confronts ‘imperfection and incompleteness in all of their grotesque materiality’ (139). I am so grateful for the close attention that the respondents to my book have paid to what I have written; for the probing questions which push at the incompleteness and inconsistencies what I have written. But, as I also write, ‘real love may resemble cruelty’; reading these responses has opened new questions for me and reopened questions I thought I had settled; has had me teetering on the edge of exhilaration and despair; has me sat, now, trying to do justice to the careful attention which has been given to me.

Continue reading “Miraculous & Extremely Fragile: A Theology of Failure Book Event response” →

Materialist enchantments

~ Marika Rose ~ 1 Comment

I was recently asked to respond to Paul Cloke, Christopher Baker, Callum Sutherland and Andrew Williams’ really interesting new book, Geographies of Postsecularity: Re-Envisaging Politics, Subjectivity and Ethics as part of the launch event for the book. Here is the text of my response, which explores narratives of (dis-)enchantment and questions about social reproduction in relation to Christianity and political activism.

I wanted to pick up on theme of enchantment in the book because it’s where the authors engage my work, partly because I’m not sure that we’re actually talking about the same thing, and partly because I’ve been developing my thinking on what we’re actually talking about when we talk about disenchantment in ways that might be productive for ongoing conversations about the books’ arguments.

The idea of disenchantment emerges as a narrative which suggests that some sense of the world as spiritual is lost with the advent of modernity, that our connection to one another is damaged and that what we need, then, is a restoration of that sense of magic and wonder. The book advocates re-enchantment as one of the characteristics of the ethics of postsecularity that the authors want to advocate for, and suggest that religion can help us restore ‘a sense of mystery and wonder … a greater acknowledgement of the possibility of the sacred, and a dissatisfaction with neoliberalised secularity’.

Continue reading “Materialist enchantments” →

Syllabi by Marika Rose

~ Marika Rose

I’ve been putting the syllabi I’ve created up on the blog for a while now but wanted to have a single place I could point people to: here, then, is that post, with links to all the different syllabi I’ve uploaded. If you’re interested in syllabi by the AUFS authors more broadly, you can check our posts tagged syllabi; if you’re interested in our more general reflections on teaching, you can take a look at our posts tagged teaching.

First year undergraduate syllabus (on Augustine, suffering and study skills): Great Christian Thinkers: Joining the Conversation
First year undergraduate syllabus: Introduction to Political Philosophy
First year undergraduate syllabus (on Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Gustavo Gutiérrez): Great Christian Thinkers 2 
Second year undergraduate syllabus: The Making of Modern Christianity: Medieval Europe
Second year undergraduate syllabus: Hegel, Marx and Dialectical Thought
Second and third year undergraduate syllabus: Christianity, Race and Colonialism
Second and third year undergraduate syllabus: Gender, Sexuality and the Bible
MA syllabus: Dazzling Darkness: Mysticism and Philosophy

Joining the Conversation syllabus

~ Marika Rose

For the past couple of years I’ve been teaching a first year introductory module called “Joining the Conversation”. The module exists to introduce students to key themes and concepts in Christian theology (hopefully in a way that engages both our philosophy and our theology students), to a key Christian thinker – St Augustine – and to a key set of study skills relating to reading texts, critically engaging with them, and writing essays. The module is organised around the theme of suffering, and the question of whether suffering is “What Matters Most”. Here’s the module descriptor I use:

Continue reading “Joining the Conversation syllabus” →