Dan Barber’s On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity is available for purchase direct from the publisher, as well as from Amazon (US, UK) and Book Depository — and wherever fine books are sold!
Even if you can’t get it in time to follow along with the book event, you should rest assured that the questions raised by this book will continue to shape conversations in theology — blog-based or otherwise — for a long time to come.
I am pleased to report that The Synaptic Gospel is published and I have now seen the finished product. Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered the book.
The book is an attempt to force a conversation between phenomenology and affect neuroscience to re-think religious communities’ practical paradigms for worship and religious education. Thinkers engaged along the way include Husserl, Stein, Panksepp, Csikszentmihalyi, and others.
I wanted to make a shameless plug for a class I’m teaching at First Presbyterian Church in Arlington, VA on liberation theology. The class starts next Sunday on January 15th from 9:45-10:45, and I anticipate the class will wind down by late April. We will be reading Elizabeth Johnson’s text Quest for the Living God. The text covers important theological developments from various perspectives: political, liberation, feminist, black/womanist, Hispanic, interreligious, process, and ecological. I also am planning on covering other liberation movements that Johnson fails to cover in her text, especially queer liberation theology and a liberation theology of disability. Let me know if you’re interested and I can provide you with more information. Anyone in the DC area is welcome to attend.
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.
In the spirit of audio offerings recently discussed by Anthony & the recent sermons posted here by Chris, I offer you now the audio from my sermon today, “All Things Shining” [PDF]. (As it turns out, Chris & I appealed to the same text and found inspiration from the same source. Go figure. & bonus points for those who can identify the phrase given to me by Anthony in a conversation on Saturday.) People who thought I was joking about making a Wallace Stevens poem my Scripture for the day proved to be surprised.
If you’re not familiar with Geez magazine, you’re missing out on a fantastic publication that is unlike any other in the religious publishing world, if one could even categorize it as a “religious publication.” The Canadian magazine, which is printed without ads, always focuses a single idea or theme for each issue, and then offers several visual, theological, reflective, and often surprising and subversive perspectives on the subject. Continue reading “A Protestant Rosary: Reversing the World in My Pocket”
I have officially submitted the manuscript for my book on TV sociopaths, which my editor and I have decided to retitle as Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television. Current estimates indicate that it should be available for sale in a little over six months.
In the meantime, don’t be “left behind!” (Ha ha — too soon?) There’s still time to purchase Awkwardness (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository) and acquaint yourself with my unique take on popular culture.
We have two further book events planned for this summer. The first, which will likely begin toward the end of June or beginning of July, will be over J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. We have been talking about the possibility of doing Jay’s book for at least a year and several readers have expressed a strong interest, so hopefully it’ll be a good discussion.
The second, which will likely be in August, will be over Ted Jennings’ Plato or Paul?: The Origins of Western Christian Homophobia. I was very involved with the production of this book — the seminar on which it was based was one of my first seminary courses and I also served as a research assistant, copy-editor, and indexer — and the thesis Jennings advances here has completely and irrevocably changed my view of the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity. However, since the book wasn’t available before recently, I probably always sounded like a crazy person, so it’s nice to be able to discuss it finally.
As preparation for the Jennings event, we will also be having two guest bloggers in late July reviewing his books on homoeroticism in Scripture, The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives in the New Testament and Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel.
I strongly encourage anyone interested in participating in comments to track down copies and try to read ahead of time — the more people we have involved in comments who have actually read the book, the more the discussion will benefit us all. (This is of course not to say that those who haven’t read should refrain from asking questions, etc.)
Over the past couple days, I have updated my CV page to include links to all my published writings (within the boundaries of copyright law) as well as all my conference presentations. Articles and reviews in university press (and of course online) journals are normally in their published PDF form; those published by commercial presses are the submitted versions.
In some cases, I hesitated to put up conference papers, particularly the earliest ones — but ultimately full disclosure seemed to be the best route.
I should add that all academics have the right to do this and they should all post archival copies of their published work to the extent permitted by the journals in question, in the interests of open access and scholarly dialogue.
UPDATE: The URL http://adamkotsko.com/ will henceforth redirect to my CV page; http://adamkotsko.com/weblog will continue to redirect to The Weblog.
An und für sich 