Modernism After The Death Of God

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

Offers new observations on the persistence of God in modern times, and considers how the war on terror and a post-9/11 society has impacted atheism.

It has long been assumed that the more modern we become, the less religious we will be. Yet a recent resurrection in faith has challenged the certainty of this belief. In these original essays and interviews, leading hermeneutical philosophers and postmodern theorists John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo engage with each other's past and present work on the subject and reflect on our transition from secularism to postsecularism. As two of the figures who have contributed the most to the theoretical reflections on the contemporary philosophical turn to religion, Caputo and Vattimo explore the changes, distortions, and reforms that are a part of our postmodern faith and the forces shaping the religious imagination today. Incisively and imaginatively connecting their argument to issues ranging from terrorism to fanaticism and from politics to media and culture, these thinkers continue to reinvent the field of hermeneutic philosophy with wit, grace, and passion.

"With fundamentalists dominating the headlines and scientists arguing about the biological and neurological basis of faith, religion is the topic of the day. But religion, Mark C. Taylor shows, is more complicated than either its defenders or critics think and, indeed, is much more influential than any of us realize. Our world, Taylor maintains, is shaped by religion even when it is least obvious. Faith and value, he insists, are unavoidable and inextricably interrelated for believers and nonbelievers alike. Using scientific theories of dynamical systems and complex adaptive networks for cultural and theological analysis, After God redefines religion for our contemporary age. Taylor begins by asking a critical question: What is religion? He then proceeds to explain how Protestant ideas in particular undergird the character and structure of our global information society--the Reformation, Taylor argues, was an information and communications revolution that effectively prepared the way for the media revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Taylor s breathtaking account of religious ideas allows us to understand for the first time that contemporary notions of atheism and the secular are already implicit in classical Christology and Trinitarian theology. Weaving together theoretical analysis and historical interpretation, Taylor demonstrates the codependence and coevolution of traditional religious beliefs and practices with modern literature, art, architecture, information technologies, media, financial markets, and theoretical biology. After God concludes with prescriptions for new ways of thinking and acting. If we are to negotiate the perils of the twenty-first century, Taylor contends, we must refigure the symbolic networks that inform our policies and guide our actions. A religion without God creates the possibility of an ethics without absolutes that leads to the promotion of creativity and life in an ever more fragile world"--Publisher description.

In an urbane and persuasive tract for our time, the distinguished Catholic theologian combines a comprehensive metaphysics with a sensitivity to contemporary existentialist thought. Father Murray traces the “problem of God” from its origins in the Old Testament, through its development in the Christian Fathers and the definitive statement by Aquinas, to its denial by modern materialism. Students and nonspecialist intellectuals may both benefit by the book, which illuminates the problem of development of doctrine that is now, even more than in the days of Newman, a fundamental issue between Roman Catholic and Protestant, theologians and nonspecialst intellectuals alike will find the subject of vital interest. As a challenge to the ecumenical dialogue, the question is raised whether, in the course of its development through different phases, the problem of God has come back to its original position. Father Murray is Ordinary professor of theology at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland. St. Thomas More Lectures, 1. "A gem of a book—lucid, illuminating, brilliantly written. A fine contribution to the current Catholic theological renaissance."—Paul Weiss.

Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.

"This book in one way undertakes a history of the concept of the aesthetic sublime: in another it is an exploration of the limits of theological thinking, where theology is understood either as a practice arising from faith or from thinking. By examining concepts like soul, experience, analogy and truth, the author issues a provocative challenge to much contemporary Christian theology to return to a more serious engagement with philosophy. Hemming explores the confrontation with God and the gods to be found in Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, often offering innovative readings of these thinkers sharply at odds with accounts to be found elsewhere."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved