The Split God

Offers a critical Pentecostal philosophy of God that challenges orthodox Christianity. Although Pentecostalism is generally considered a conservative movement, in The Split God Nimi Wariboko shows that its operative everyday notion of God is a radical one that poses, under cover of loyalty, a challenge to orthodox Christianity. He argues that the image of God that arises out of the everyday practices of Pentecostalism is a split God—a deity harboring a radical split that not only destabilizes and prevents God himself from achieving ontological completeness but also conditions and shapes the practices and identities of Pentecostal believers. Drawing from the work of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, among others, Wariboko presents a close reading of everyday Pentecostal practices, and in doing so, uncovers and presents a sophisticated conversation between radical continental philosophy and everyday forms of spirituality. By de-particularizing Pentecostal studies and Pentecostalism, Wariboko broadens our understanding of the intellectual aspects of the global Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. “Not since the early work of Thomas J. J. Altizer has a theologian/philosopher opened such a radical new vision of reality with new language as Nimi Wariboko does in The Split God. Through an analysis of Pentecostalism, Wariboko creates a vivid, shocking theology that self-consciously repeats classical Christian orthodoxy (in some of its modes) while transforming it so as to make new sense of Pentecostal beliefs and practices. He mines the language of contemporary continental critical theory of the psychoanalytical and Marxist sort for resources to express his claim that God is split, not whole, reality both spiritual and material is split, not whole, society is split, not whole, and persons are split, not whole. What Pentecostalism does, he claims, is to unite these split parts into vital ways of living in the face of God without making them holistically coherent, just alive and vital.” — Robert Cummings Neville, author of Defining Religion: Essays in Philosophy of Religion

Healing the Split consists of the collected essays of poet, literary critic and philosopher Marc Elihu Hofstadter. The essays stretch from Hofstadter's early scholarly articles about poets William Carlos Williams and Yves Bonnefoy through articles published in the Redwood Coast Review about poetry, art, music, science, politics and France to recent articles concerning the "split" between the sciences and the humanities, reason and feeling/intuition/faith. The book embodies Hofstadter's consistent belief in the idea that all human activities are composed of an "objective" element and a "subjective" element. Human knowledge, whether scientific, mathematical, philosophical or artistic, contains a degree of objective certainty mixed with a component of subjective feeling. The differences between science and the humanities are differences of degree of objectivity, not of essence, and the knowledge the humanities display is a genuine form of knowledge, less certain than science but rich in tangible, felt experience. Even early in his career as a literary critic, Hofstadter was interested in how such otherwise diverse poets as Williams and Bonnefoy sacralize the coming together of mind and world in all forms of human experience. As Williams put it, "No ideas but in things "-by which he meant, not, Let there not be any ideas but, Let all ideas be inextricably entwined with the physical world Hofstadter argues that, in all our activities, there is a mixture of the thinking, reasoning mind and the parts of us that feel, perceive, touch-our bodies, our hearts. Science and philosophy are the great achievements of the mind, while art and religion are the most powerful consummations of sensing and feeling-yet science and philosophy are partly emotive, and art and theology partly rational. The difference, again, is in degree. Healing the Split is an attempt to bring reason and feeling/intuition/faith together, to show how they are intimately related. The Buddhist faith is key to this effort, because Buddhism doesn't analyze out reason and non-rational knowledge as separate faculties but tries to unite them in a direct, embodied kind of experience that "heals the split" between them and makes the individual human being whole. In Buddhism, everything we know is known through consciousness, and distinctions between subject and object, mind and world, logic and faith become artificial, since consciousness is essentially unitary. And Buddhism sees all phenomena, known through consciousness, as being related in a universal "web" everything is connected ultimately to everything else, and the world is essentially One. Healing the Split is finally a work of mysticism in the line of Parmenides, who believed that everything is one, or the Kabbalists, who worshipped the All in the form of "Ha Shem" the unnamable "Name." Marc Elihu Hofstadter was born in New York City in 1945. He received his B.A. in French literature from Swarthmore College in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1975. He has taught American literature at Santa Cruz, the Universite d'Orleans (on a Fulbright Lectureship) and Tel Aviv University. In 1980 he obtained his Master of Library Science degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1982 to 2005 served as the Librarian of the City of San Francisco's transit agency. He has published five volumes of poetry: House of Peace, Visions, Shark's Tooth, Luck and Rising at 5 AM, all of which are available on amazon.com, and his poems, translations and essays have appeared in over sixty magazines. He lives in the retirement community of Rossmoor in Walnut Creek, California with his partner, the artist David Zurlin.

For the first time in almost half a century, the world of Hopkins is examined as an indivisible whole. The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins is a synthetic study of Hopkins's writings, written within a framework of semiotic phenomenology.

Starting with Marx and Freud, scholars have attempted to identify the primary ethical challenge of capitalism. They have named injustice, inequality, repression, exploitative empires, and capitalism's psychic hold over all of us, among other ills. Nimi Wariboko instead argues that the core ethical problem of capitalism lies in the split nature of the modern economy, an economy divided against itself. Production is set against finance, consumption against saving, and the future against the present. As the rich enjoy their lifestyle, their fellow citizens live in servitude. The economy mimics the structure of our human subjectivity as Saint Paul theorizes in Romans 7: the law constitutes the subject as split, traversed by negativity. The economy is split, shot through with a fundamental antagonism. This fundamental negativity at the core of the economy disturbs its stability and identity, generating its destructive drive. The Split Economy develops a robust theoretical framework at the intersection of continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, theology, and political economy to reveal a fundamental dynamic at the heart of capitalism.

The quest for economic development is arguably the most frustrating and tragic dimension of human existence in Africa. As its primary task, The Split Time constructs an economic philosophy from a tradition of thought that is indigenous to Africa, arguing that there are long-neglected resources within African philosophy to guide economic policymakers toward creating an African economy that can sustain human flourishing. Exploring notions of destiny, temporality, and desire, Nimi Wariboko constructs an economic-philosophical framework to rethink solutions to the vexing problem of economic development in Africa. He also provides a robust social-ethical perspective in which the basic aspects of economic life—the agential (accounts of human agency, telos), the circumstantial (material/social context), and the affective (to feel appropriately what matters to a people in an economy or their desire for human flourishing)—come together to fire social imagination about development policies for the common good.

Truth About the Split, the English translation of A’ina’-e-Sadaqat, written by Hazrat Khalifatul-Masih II(ra), is a detailed reply to The Split by Maulawi Muhammad Ali, who after having denied the institution of Khilafat had seceded from the main body of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama‘at and established his party headquarters at Lahore. Truth About the Split has been divided into two main parts. The first part consists of the refutation of the eleven misstatements and unfounded charges leveled against Hazrat Khalifatul-Masih II(ra) in The Split, and of the thoroughly fabricated story of the Ahmadiyya dissension. First few misstatements revolve around a person named Zahiruddin who was believed to be, by the Lahore Party, the originator of the belief of the prophethood of the Promised Messiah(as). Another controversy was whether those who denied the Promised Messiah(as) should be regarded as Muslims or Kafir-bil-Ma’mur. In fact, Hazrat Khalifatul-Masih II(ra) had already proved that the Promised Messiah(as) regarded them as the latter. Another controversy generated by Maulawi Muhammad Ali was that people had pledged Bai‘at with the second Khalifa in ignorance, and that they had later renounced their Bai‘at with him. The second part of the book deals with the true story of the split. It elaborates how Khawaja Kamaluddin, Maulawi Muhammad Ali and few others intrigued to bring down the Institution of Khilafat during the time of Hazrat Khalifatul Masih I(ra), how they openly showed their hostility after his demise by proposing delay in the election of the next Khalifa, and what finally impelled them to set up their own separate organization. The book then sets out, in clear terms—in the light of Al-Wasiyyat by the Promised Messiah(as)—as to who (Anjuman or the Khalifa) should actually succeed the Promised Messiah(as).