non defixi

philosophical libraries

2012-01-24T10:23:00.002-06:00

I stumbled upon an amazing site the other day (via Early Modern Thought Online) run by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Università di Cagliari. Biblioteche dei Filosofi is a database of the private libraries of great thinkers over the past few centuries. The site includes Nicholas of Cusa, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Stillingfleet, Zwingli, Goethe, Arminius, and many others. It looks like for most of the personalities, a pdf of a previously published index volume is included that lists the holdings of their personal library. These are of course the old and out-of-copyright versions; for instance, Georg Reimer's 1835 list of Schleiermacher's library is included rather than the more recent critical editions. This site offers a lot for curious exploration, as well as useful research material.

The Biblioteche also has an extensive explanation of the project that is worth reading, and they are looking for contributors.

A few items...

2012-01-11T11:57:00.000-06:00

...in the journal literature.

A relatively new journal - The Journal of Episcopal Church Canon Law - is being published by the Virginia Theological Seminary.

The latest issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology is full of articles that look interesting... Najeb Awad on Augustine's de Trinitate as de Spirito Sancto ; Adam Eitel on Thomas Aquinas and Victor Preller ; John Webster on Torrance and Scripture ; and Kevin Hector on the Barthian controversy over trinity and election.

The forthcoming 2012 issue of Medioevo is a theme issue on "Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate
and Its Fortune in Medieval Philosophy."

Medieval Mystical Theology, which replaced the Eckhart Review in 2011, will now publish two issues per year.

Jan. 9 - "Godforsakenness as the End of Prophecy"

2012-01-05T15:33:00.000-06:00

I will be sharing a paper with the theology workshop here at the Divinity School, entitled "Godforsakenness as the End of Prophecy: a proposal from Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre". If you're in the area, I'd be happy to see you there.

The Southern Cone and Anglican Unity

2011-12-21T12:32:00.000-06:00

The ACNS has just released a statement from the province of the Southern Cone, which has approved the new Anglican Communion Covenant. This is good news for progress in Anglican unity, and a change from the previous situation, when then-primate Gregory Venables signed the Oxford Statement and affirmed that "the current text [of the Covenant] is fatally flawed and so support for this initiative is no longer appropriate."

Most interesting, to me, is the status of the Southern Cone in its relationship with the North American churches, and how this affects its standing in the wider communion. Last October I discussed the dismissal of the Southern Cone from ecumenical bodies because of its intervention in the affairs of other Anglican provinces. Kenneth Kearon had inquired about this transgression of the Windsor moratoria, with no response. In today's statement from the Southern Cone, however, we read:

the Southern Cone had held churches in North America under its wing for some time while the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) was formed. However, the Province has not maintained jurisdiction over any local churches there for over a year. As a result, all so called ‘border crossings’ by any provincial members ceased (as of October, 2010) even though the Southern Cone still remains in impaired communion with US and Canadian Provinces. It is hoped that the Covenant can now provide Communion stability.

This is an argument I've been making for a while... that continuing Anglican groups who have been in a situation of oversight from other provinces need to get out on their own and move into the ACNA as quickly as possible. Oversight from elsewhere, even if justified by Gospel purposes, means that these provinces remain delinquent as far as the Windsor Report and the canons of the Anglican churches are concerned.

If the Southern Cone is claiming that their border crossing ended in October of 2010, it's a shame that they never established communication with Kearon in order to prevent dismissal from the Unity, Faith, and Order Commission around the same time. I'm not sure what their current status is in this body, but hopefully the organizational machinery can now start to turn in the direction of reinstating their delegate, if this process has not begun already. The acceptance of the Covenant also raises questions about the future direction of GAFCON... that such an important province as the Southern Cone has affirmed the Covenant is hopefully a signal that minds are beginning to change from the rather harsh views that have come from conservative quarters about the viability of a covenanted Anglican future.

A few items...

2011-12-19T08:44:00.002-06:00

We are happily away from immediate responsibilities of work and school for a few weeks -- a much needed holiday with family. I've just finished reading H. Stuart Hughes' Consciousness and Society, which I have been meaning to get to ever since encountering it in the footnotes of Pauck's little Harnack-Troeltsch biography. I would definitely recommend the book (with a few hesitations) for a survey of a pivotal period in recent intellectual history. Interestingly, Hughes was pretty dismissive of Troeltsch, presenting him as a decidedly second-rate thinker throughout (a worthwhile criticism to consider, I think, though a bit too harsh as presented). I am now into a much-needed rereading of Schleiermacher's On Religion, and then on to his Hermeneutics and Criticism.

Charles Morerod has been replaced by Serge Thomas Bonino as the general secretary of the International Theological Commission. I mentioned Morerod earlier this year in relation to some odd statements about theology and philosophy.

Hildegard of Bingen will be made a doctor of the church.

Congratulations to two PTS theologians... W. Travis McMacken for successfully defending, and David Congdon for an editing position with IVP.

Difficulties have arisen between the Anglican Mission in the Americas and the Province of Rwanda. AMiA bishops have broken (and created schism?) with Rwanda. Time will tell what future oversight will look like... perhaps a move towards ACNA?

The latest issue of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal is out, celebrating 25 years of the Ecclesiastical Law Society. Included in the issue is a reprinting of the late Eric Kemp's "The Spirit of the Canon Law and its Application in England," which was given as the keynote address of the Society's first meeting and published in the first issue of the journal.

"What did patristic research look like 100 years ago?"

2011-11-28T12:55:00.002-06:00

In commemoration of its fifteenth year, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum has published a theme issue on the historiography of the patristic period around 1911. Included are articles on patristic scholarship in Germany, Armenia, Belgium, and Italy. There are also articles covering important works published during this time such as the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum and the third edition of the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. The following is taken from the opening editorial:

The Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum/Journal of Ancient Christianity (ZAC) is celebrating its fifteenth “birthday” this year. On this occasion, the editors have decided to dedicate the thematic issue not to a specific topic from Early Christianity but to a question pertaining to research history: “What did patristic research look like 100 years ago?” The issue focuses, above all, on the German context, given that patristics played a prominent, if not central, role in German academic life of the late Wilhelmine period. This perspective is complemented by observations on the situation in Belgium and the Netherlands, Armenia and Italy. These angles are, of course, paradigmatic, and the selection was made for pragmatic reasons. For research on France and the English-speaking area, let us refer to the conference proceedings edited by Jacques Fontaine et al. (Patristique et Antiquité Tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930, Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1993) and to recent studies published by Elizabeth A. Clark, respectively. The contribution looking at Armenia shall serve as an incentive to produce analogous research for other linguistic areas as well. The same goes for the entire Russian speaking area.

A few items...

2011-11-07T22:12:00.001-06:00

Erik Peterson's Theological Tractates has been translated by Michael J. Hollerich and is out from Stanford UP. Hollerich has a post up at Political Theology about the volume.

David Brakke is moving to Ohio State University, and in the meantime will be teaching a spring course at the University of Chicago on Gnosticism.

Two forthcoming articles in Religious Studies on religious experience:

A cfp for an edited volume... Biblical Philosophy? Exploratory Essays.

J. Kameron Carter at the University of Chicago

2011-11-02T18:43:00.000-05:00

This is a bit late notice, but J. Kameron Carter will be coming to speak for the Race and Religion workshop here at the University of Chicago tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 3 at 4:30, in Swift Hall. He will be speaking on “Religion and the Future of Death; or, Fanon’s Eschatology”. The discussant for the workshop will be Michelle Wright of Northwestern University.

Thanks to Julius for pulling together the workshop this year, and especially for bringing Carter to the Divinity School. Don't miss it!

Ecclesiology more ecclesiastical

2011-09-27T22:23:00.003-05:00

My theological work over the past few years has maintained a consistently split personality; while a substantial portion of my personal research and publication has been ecclesiological in nature, this focus is virtually absent from my coursework and indeed from my public self-presentation as a student of theology. "Ecclesiology" is sufferable as a sub-field of theology (or better, of jurisprudence), but I bristle at the ugly term "ecclesiologist" and the idea that theoretical accounts of the churches should occupy the majority of a theologian's career.

I began my pursuit of theology with a much more "ecclesial" temper. A fervor for the liturgical basis of the Church's confession and a prioritizing of communio as prolegomenon to dogmatics is much of what allowed me to turn away from intentions of pastoral ministry and toward an academic career in theology. Once I had realized theology as a churchly discipline and could better appreciate the ministerial function of this particular intellectual work, I was able to feel more at home with my own gifts and not as if I were playing an ill-fitting role (and badly) as someone aspiring to pastoral ministry.

While I would not say that I now take theology to be any less "ecclesial" or theorizing about the church any less important so far as it goes, these commitments have certainly receded from obvious prominence in my theological work. Indeed, while I still write about church structures a good deal, I don't hold nearly as many strong theological opinions about "The Church" as I used to, and I think that the popularity of ecclesiology as a theological sub-discipline is in many respects harmful to good theological work. It too often leads to an unnecessary metaphysics of what is really a pretty mundane (if awe-inspiring) social structure. And this sort of over-theorized ecclesiology isn't simply my diagnosis of the "ecclesial" camps in theology. The various event-oriented ecclesiologies are just as concerned with a proper systematic account of "the Church," and therefore just as liable to making too much of the Church as a theoretical entity.

I obviously haven't given up on the theological importance of the churches. I simply don't think that pursuing a theory of the Church tends to be very worthwhile or interesting. There is no Ecclesia vera to speak of. We only really have an Evangelium verum as a workable basis for enduring theological reflection.

Although it sounds counter-intuitive, this is why ecclesiology should be more ecclesiastical. Not because the ecclesiastical structures of the churches are infused with some metaphysical import... quite the opposite, actually. Because the churches do not exist on the basis of an ideal ecclesial form, theological reflection upon the churches is best served by an emphasis on the nuts and bolts of the structures of Christian life in community. I came around to this stance in my work on problems in Anglican canon law. The specifics of polity are usually absent in more rarefied discussions of ecclesiology, which trade much more in talk of "Spirit" and "unity" and things that somehow, whole cloth, "make the Church". The problem with codification is that it doesn't make for nearly as dramatic a statement. A Church doesn't stand or fall on the particularities of ordination rubrics the way that it does in the case of big themes like "Constantinianism" or "Theosis." The latter will preach. Quibbling about the former runs the risk of joining those theologians who talk about angels dancing on pinheads.

But pursuing a preachy ecclesiology of grand schemes runs the risk of seeing the churches through the lens of overwrought categories and thereby missing out on the more mundane theoretical work that actually helps the myriad communions of our Gospel to work alongside one another in conscious structural tandem. I've come to really enjoy picking apart small problems with ecclesial structures and not worrying so much about what it means to "be the Church". Solving these problems can actually get some real work done. Offering yet another vision de Ecclesia might inspire or provide a new vocabulary for describing our communal situation, and I don't want to minimize that. But we have more than enough of such visions at our disposal already, and in any case the practice of this sort of ecclesiology comes pretty naturally to any reader of the Scriptures or hearer of the preached Word. In contrast, there is a real lack of good technical work of an ecclesiastical bent, and I think that theological reflection on ecclesiology would be best served by tending more toward these ecclesiastical concerns.

A few items...

2011-09-06T18:07:00.001-05:00

Notre Dame announces its first endowed chair in Byantine theology. The chairholder will have joint appointments in the Medieval Institute and the Theology Department.

Travis has posted a rough translation by Matt Bruce from the newly published Eberhard Busch Tagebuch 1965-68. The volume offers biographical material on Busch's work with Barth. And good news... Tom Kraft has confirmed that T&T Clark is working on a translation.

Two recent articles on Schleiermacher... Robert Merrihew Adams on philosophical aspects of his Christology, and Johannes Wischmeyer on his involvement with the founding of the University of Berlin. [the second link goes straight to a pdf download]

Cardinal Levada, prefect of the CDF, is retiring.

There has been a lot of discussion on blogs about George Monbiot's article on academic publishing, which I mentioned a few days ago. Anthropologi.info has a post worth reading that summarizes a number of responses. Many involve open access solutions, either official ones or personal posting articles in violation copyright agreements. I continue to think that a sustainable market of scholarly literature is possible and useful, and that individual scholars can do the most good by 1) avoiding publishing in journals that perpetuate the problem (I know this can make it tough for theologians when so many of our journals are at presses like Wiley-Blackwell), and 2) writing to the editorial boards of those journals and letting them know about your concerns.

A conference at the University of Chicago Divinity School on Eriugena and Creation, in honor of Edouard Jeauneau of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

Bibliographic notes: Röhr, Ernesti

2011-09-03T17:04:00.005-05:00

I have tried to avoid writing too many posts of the following sort, out of concern that they would be unhelpful or uninteresting to most readers. But the problem of resource availability has been on my mind lately... instigated in its present iteration, I think, by Robert's comments on interlibrary loan services. So bear with me if the particulars of this post are irrelevant to you. You may still be interested in my introductory remarks, and may resonate with "the chase" in its narrative aspects even if your own bibliographic pursuits are taking you elsewhere.

Apart from books that are in print or otherwise widely available, a good deal of the textual material used by the deeper-digging scholar is going to be difficult to find. This may be because a text is terribly old yet not one of those lucky Digitized, or because it is an orphan secondary source from more recent decades. Scholarly journals from previous centuries (as I'll mention below) can also be a huge pain to track down unless your library has a pretty extensive collection. You'll find (some of) them in digitized form, but the (lack of) cataloging work on them is so bad that one can only make heads or tails of dates and issue numbers with some difficulty.

Big projects to make texts available should of course be supported. We need more volumes digitized, more reprints available, and more sophisticated ways of sharing amongst libraries. But it's also imperative to foster a less sophisticated network of sharing. Small libraries, the grooming of physical book collections, showcasing one's treasured acquisitions... all sound quite antiquated and are usually associated with those Luddite backwaters continuing to dismiss the digital humanities. I don't understand why that needs to be the case, though.

In "Unpacking My Library", Benjamin writes, "Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter." He is speaking here of the appreciation inherent in personal ownership of objects, but I would argue that books get their due from the less efficient private circumstances of hoarding and sharing in another sense as well. Such smaller-scale curating opens up knowledge of these books as much as it closes them off. The researcher grasping for clues in various library catalogues and database searches will appreciate the odd bibliographic glimpse when it comes along, and register the information in their own inner catalogue of texts to be recalled. These texts aren't a part of my private collection, but my story of pursuing them is something of a private recollection that goes beyond the vocation of a public collection.

So, following are bibliographic notes on two texts that I have run across or failed to run across in various formats: Johann August Ernesti's treatise on the threefold office of Christ, and Johann Friedrich Röhr's review of Schleiermacher's 1820/21 Glaubenslehre (as well as, by extension, the journal in which it was published).

Johann August Ernesti, de Officio Christi Triplici (1768, 1773, etc.)

Ernesti's treatise is often cited as a marker for general dissatisfaction with the doctrine of Christ's threefold office on the basis of the ambiguity introduced by metaphorical language to the doctrine of atonement. The work is easily enough found included in his Opuscula Theologica (1773) pp. 411-438. The original 1768 edition is barely extant and I haven't found it at all online. What I didn't realize until a few weeks ago was that Ernesti's treatise was also translated into German and published in 1775.

I stumbled upon a reference to a Gedanken über einige Stücke in der Lehre von Jesu Christo by Ernesti and was suspicious about the topical similarity, so I checked into it. The page length seemed wrong considering the Latin was less than thirty pages, but it turned out that the publications was actually two essays: "Ueber die Genugthuung Jesu Christi" and "Ueber das dreifache Amt Christi." These essay titles are not going to show up in any catalog. In fact, even the Gedanken by Ernesti might not show up in a catalog. A number of the (few) worldwide holdings for this title are bound with a 1790 work by Johann Friedrich Jacobi. The copy at the University of Chicago is actually bound between Jacobi's work and a German translation of Edward Gibbon. Luckily, the catalogers at the University of Chicago know what they're doing and actually have separate bibliographic records for Jacobi, Gibbon, and Ernesti that all cross-list to the same LC number. Otherwise, when I went to the catalog with the alternate Ernesti title and a mere suspicion in hand, I would have reached a dead end. Ueber das dreifache Amt would be hidden under the Gedanken, which in turn would have been hidden under the completely unrelated title by Jacobi.

Following are some pictures of the volume. I have not been able to find the German translation digitized anywhere. You can see that in a few places a reader has corrected or expanded upon Ernesti's citations. I haven't gone back to the Latin to see if it was an original mistake or one made in the 1775 version (or, for that matter, whether the redactor was the one mistaken).

Johann Friedrich Röhr,“Besprechung Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre", Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek 4 (1823), 371-394, 555-579.

This search has been less successful. Röhr was a rationalist theologian and editor of the journal Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek. It was in this venue that he published his review of the first edition of the Glaubenslehre in 1823. Schleiermacher knew and worked with Röhr in other editorial capacities, although he didn't think much of the latter's review of the Glaubenslehre.

The review is reprinted in the critical edition of Schleiermacher's works, KGA 7.3, pp. 505-523 (I've mentioned the usefulness of KGA 7.3 in a previous post). Some of the later volumes of Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek are easy enough to find in the United States, and the easiest way to do so is the link through Harvard's library to the digitized versions (as I said above, you can find these by searching through Google Books, but the metadata on these searches is so awful that it takes a good deal more sorting out). I have not had any luck finding any of the volumes from the 1820's, though. If you're studying in Continental Europe you may have more luck. The journal is listed in a number of German universities, but it's listed as a serials title and I'm not sure what individual issue holdings are available.

So in the case of Röhr's review we can benefit from the prominence of Schleiermacher's work in modern theology and the surrounding literature that it draws to the fore as a result. But everything else published in the Prediger-Bibliothek during the 1820's remains relatively inaccessible. There may not be anything groundbreaking in this collection of texts, but surely some published sermons or editorials of the period would be useful to scholars. Which is, again, why I find this sort of bibliographic note-taking worthwhile. No current readers of the blog may have any immediate need for this information, but someone who is searching for one of these texts a few years from now could stumble upon my remarks and make a connection to the material that otherwise wouldn't have happened – despite all of the hard work that libraries, Google, and publishers are doing to get the work out there.

The library cannot afford it

2011-08-30T15:05:00.003-05:00

Roger Pearce links an article from The Guardian about the pricing of academic journal literature. The focus is mostly on Elsevier, but also discusses pricing at different publishers and highlights problems for both libraries and independent researchers:

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.

The other day I posted about a happy migration away from Elsevier by an intellectual history journal. Two years ago I had written to the editor of The History of European Ideas and requested that they consider taking this very step. I'm glad they did eventually, and I encourage you to look at my letter and take similar action with the journal Modern Theology, published by Wiley-Blackwell and one of the most well-read systematic theology journals today. Modern Theology charges U.S. libraries $824 for a yearly print and online subscription; libraries in the UK pay £498. The EU pays €633, the developing world pays $483, and all other parts of the world pay $1121. This is the most expensive English-language theology journal I'm aware of. The institutional subscription is more expensive than the Elsevier-published History of European Ideas. Bill Cavanaugh is one of the editors for Modern Theology, and not the sort that I would imagine as unreceptive to these sorts of concerns.

As I've stated in previous posts about the sustainability of academic publishing, these prices are dwarfed by science publications and are not the biggest contributors to the buckling of library budgets or the unavailability of literature to scholars. But this doesn't really matter if you're at a small seminary that doesn't subscribe to any chemistry journals. In such institutions, it's Modern Theology that's making your academic research needs unaffordable.

And it's not just the small institutions. Here at the University of Chicago, home of the new Mansueto Library and one of the world's great research library systems, we are dealing with budget issues that make subscriptions difficult. In June I mentioned that the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon had ended its open access status earlier this year because they couldn't afford to keep it up. The BBKL now has an option for institutional subscription to the online version, and I recently emailed our bibliographer about the possibility of the University of Chicago getting such a subscription. Although I had received positive responses to all previous purchase requests that I had made over the past few years, this time she replied that, unfortunately, there is no new funding for electronic resources requiring ongoing payment. With a subscription of €300/year... much less than a year of Modern Theology... the online BBKL is still unavailable.

Library budgets will not only cut the most ridiculously expensive resources, or the least useful. Cuts like this always come in odd places, and they come alongside funds allocated to expansion projects elsewhere in the institution. This means that any number of resources are currently in danger for scholars- from the obscure journal subscription, to the small book series that isn't carried through the library's new vendor, to the 10-hour/week shelving job that pays your bills as a student, to the ILL book that can't be shipped to you without charge because funding for that program has limited the number of monthly requests you can make.

I am not opposed to various open access ventures, and I make use of them frequently enough. I am also glad that pdf's of articles flow more freely through personal channels amongst scholars than they do through publishers or libraries. But I'm not convinced that having a scholarly literature market is in itself the problem. It's not the publishers charging $40 for a hardback that make research inaccessible to people (either by personal acquisition or through local institutions), and if we could create a situation where publishers make a living off of doing what they do while libraries can do what they do within the means of their funding, the result is going to be much more fruitful than an entirely open access situation where everyone expects literature to be completely free... that is, where no one is willing to fund a common effort to edit, print, or curate scholarly work.

UPDATE: Since posting on this, at least two other blogs have weighed in on the article... New APPS and Savage Minds.

nuts, bolts, & the blogroll

2011-08-27T11:40:00.000-05:00

The other day when Ben was transitioning Faith & Theology over to its new location, I was irked to find his blogroll with recent post updates temporarily missing. Realizing how much I refer to this list as a sort of secondary Google Reader, I decided to change my own blogroll to the same format for the benefit of readers. I may end up splitting it into multiple lists in order to distinguish theology blogs from other disciplines or aspects of academic research, but for now it's just the same blogroll in a different format.

Something seems to be wrong, though. My tip-off was that the prolific Jason Goroncy has, according to my sidebar, not posted anything in the last four years. I've tried deleting and re-entering Per Crucem ad Lucem, but it still shows up at the bottom of the blog list. My apologies to Jason and anyone else whose blog is failing to update. Hopefully the issue will figure itself out (because I don't have confidence in figuring it out myself!).

In addition to the changes at F&T, do note that Davey Henreckson has moved from Theopolitical to Reforming Virtue. Also, Ave Maria University has saved Thomistica.net. Finally, Paul J. Griffiths's site does not seem to exist. Does anyone know whether there is a technical problem or he just decided to end it all of a sudden?

A new home for History of European Ideas

2011-08-26T10:51:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, I wrote a bit about the publisher Elsevier and its problematic role in academic journal publishing. In particular, I mentioned the journal History of European Ideas, which is put out by Elsevier for the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History. I did end up writing the editor of that journal to express my concern about their publisher and recommend that they seek a new publishing home (You can find my letter here). At the time, the editor responded to me by saying that they "have personally had a very good working relationship" with Elsevier, but that he would be in touch with them about the issues I had raised. I didn't think anything of the matter and figured that while it was good to voice my concerns, nothing would come of it.

This morning, though, Against the Grain has reported that three Elsevier history titles- including History of European Ideas- are moving to Routledge. This is good news, and while I wouldn't begin to think that my letter to the editor was what caused the move, I think this outcome does demonstrate that expressions of concern from individual scholars are at least heard by people on the other end, and sometimes might contribute in a small way to a reevaluation of current practice.

[Also note the other intellectual history journal that has been published for some time at Routledge: Intellectual History Review.]

A few items...

2011-08-13T09:50:00.005-05:00

Posting has died down because we've been busy lately preparing to move, and we'll probably be relatively busy this autumn semester as well. We're starting as resident heads in an undergraduate dorm at the university, which means our family will be living with the students, managing day-to-day issues, and organizing activities throughout the year for a "house" of about 60 undergraduates.

Here are a few items...

Jim West points out that the Weimar Edition of Luther's Works is available online. He's also trying to find a good home for his Ulrich von Hutton Opera Omnia.

The Newberry Library acquired the rare books collection of McCormick Theological Seminary a few years ago, and has just completed a substantial cataloging project on it. Next Wednesday they'll be hosting a colloquium (free and open to the public) on the new collection.

An article from the latest issue of The Journal of Ecclesiastical History looks fascinating-- "Eucharistic Sacrifice, American Polemics, the Oxford Movement and Apostolicae Curae." The authors offer a revisionist account of 19th century theology of the sacrificial priesthood, tracing it from American Episcopal thinkers to the 1841 response of the Catholic archbishop of St. Louis rather than from the Oxford Movement to Apostolicae Curae.

From De Gruyter in September, the Gertrud von le Fort - Friedrich Gogarten Correspondence.

Gordon Kaufman, 1925-2011.

Theology and belief

2011-07-12T15:29:00.003-05:00

Anthony has responded critically to the idea that one must be a believer in order to understand theology, and a related criticism follows in the comments on the relationship between belief/orthodoxy and the vocation of the theologian. I'm inclined to agree with Anthony and Adam here... on a bare empirical level, lots of theology seems to get done and understood by non-believers. More substantively, the contributions of theology to the understanding of the faith do not seem obviously to require a right relationship with God. Why would they, exactly? And what concern is it of ours if a theologian is not of the fold? Christ says of the exorcist who is not a disciple that whoever is not against Him is for Him. If the theologian isn't charged with casting out demons, on what basis would we hold them to a higher standard than those who did such things in the scriptures?

Adam also makes a good point in the comments about theology as a critical reflection requiring distance from belief... what we do as theologians puts the possibility of childlike faith in serious jeopardy, and we would do well to take great care in recognizing the risks of our critical work if it is to remain edifying for the churches. We do not (I say this as a believing theologian, at least) pursue critical inquiry in order to criticize the faith. We use criticism to engage with theories about the faith (those made explicit as well as those left without explication), in order to gain better understanding.*

With regard to our own souls, I think that the theologian is something like the rich man trying to get to heaven; a great amount of knowledge carries with it an increased difficulty in recognizing that "where there is knowledge, it will pass away." Anyone who pursues a path of theology should regularly pray for the safety of their own soul, because while the work of theology is often joyful and inspires faith, it can also do quite the opposite. Theology is not in itself a pious profession... at base it is a theorizing task, and it only serves piety when piety uses theology as a tool for understanding.

I would also add that while I don't think one needs to be a believer to be a theologian, and further that theology is even tied in important ways to the possibility of unbelief, I do think it's fair enough to say that the believing theologian should at least be the normative model for theological work and that unbelieving theologians will probably always be an exception to the norm. This is not merely a statement of institutional exclusivity or a prioritizing of orthodoxy. Theological work requires an entertainment of the truth of the faith in a more basic sense than it requires a suspension of belief for the purposes of critically reflecting upon the coherence of beliefs. What distinguishes constructive theological work from other critical engagements with religion is its assessment of the value and meaning of the faith itself. A preliminary recognition of coherence seems to be required in order to meaningfully do something with the faith, and so it seems understandable that believers look on unbelieving theologians with some wariness... not even because they will corrupt orthodoxy (believing theologians do that well enough on their own!), but simply because there are no strong reasons for constructive aims concerning a faith that does not carry any meaning or value. And while the meaning or value of the faith may be identified elsewhere than the truth of its teaching (a non-believing theologian may legitimately find the faith valuable for philosophical, ethical, societal, political, etc. reasons apart from the theological truth of its Gospel... as Adam says, you just need to "care" about it), the Church's teaching does recognize a space of orthodoxy as its own norm, and adherence to this norm in life and thought is the most obvious basis upon which one would do theoretical work with Christian teaching. To say this is a far cry from saying that theological knowledge is a divine gift predicated upon a reception in faith that excludes non-believers from practicing or understanding theology, but I do want to recognize that theologians working from a dogmatic framework with an assumption of faith have good reason for doing so, and that non-believing theologians working within the Christian tradition should expect various traditions of orthodox and heterodox Christian teachings to set the tone for what is recognized as typical theological work.

*Here I'd want to offer some qualification to Adam's comment about arguing for the truth of the faith requiring critical distance. I agree with what he says, but it should also be said that not all theology argues for the truth or falsity of any tenets of faith. If theology is being done simply to better understand the meaning of a confession of faith, or to entertain various speculative options, or to mediate differing understandings, tasks like this don't seem to require being "open to the possibility that [the Christian tradition is] not right" if by this he means raising the possibility of an abandonment of a broad adherence to the faith. Such openness to abandoning belief seems to only be a necessity for apologetic tasks in theology, where one presumes to stand as judge over the truth of certain assertions.

A few items...

2011-07-12T10:02:00.001-05:00

We're enjoying a three week stay with family in Arlington, VA and Lewes, DE right now, hence the quiet. Here is a shorter list of a few items, just to throw something up in the meantime...

Kurt Koch's address to the PCPCU 50th anniversary dialogue has been published by Il Regno, and is currently available in open access.

A new journal... the Claremont Journal of Religion. Submissions for the inaugural issue are due in November.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada have published responses on canonical issues related to the Anglican Communion Covenant (the TEC paper was actually written in February, but for some reason not made public until last month).

BBKL no longer open access

2011-06-23T07:39:00.000-05:00

I was a bit distressed last night to go into the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon and find that all of the articles are chopped off after a brief view and require subscription for full access. This database is a great resource for bibliographic assistance, and the online version keeps up quite well with the recent literature. Apparently the Lexikon couldn't afford to keep up open access, and tried out a system of voluntary donation at the beginning of 2011, to no avail. Now there is a system of individual registration tiered by extent of use, with prices getting rather steep rather quickly. The publisher makes reference to an access for libraries, but I'm not clear on exactly how that works. This option must be new with the closed access; the Free University of Berlin just started a free trial of it last month, and the University of Chicago doesn't even seem to have it at the moment.

Some of the articles remain rather long before loss of access, while others offer only a few lines. Speaking for myself, I only ever really used the bibliographies at the end of the entries, which in all cases seems to be cut off from open use. Your library may carry print volumes of the BBKL if you don't have access to the online database, and a new volume is put out yearly for this version (rather than updated on an ongoing basis).

Griffiths on ecclesiology

2011-06-22T00:54:00.006-05:00

Paul Griffiths has found the History of Religions analogue to the ecclesiological analogue to the theological idea that God is not a being among other beings in a passage from Simone Weil.

Charitably, one might applaud the fact that Griffiths rejects the evolutionary account of religions common in the 19th century that charts a course from primitive forms to the conveniently supreme exemplar of Christianity. Realistically, though, one might well wish for a return to the frying pan of such earlier false starts in comparative studies. Griffiths gives new meaning to the concept of ecclesia sui iuris!

With regard to the communitates ecclesiales that Griffiths presumably does not take to be ecclesiae sensu proprio, I worry that he is leaving himself precious little ground upon which to affirm Lumen Gentium 15 when he says of the Catholic Church that "it is an institution unlike all others, to others as the Lord is to creatures." Most of the bases for coniunctio offered by the Council strike me as pretty "institutional" in nature. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church takes the Reformation churches to be inadequate precisely at the point of the efficacy of the sacraments (viz., the priesthood and by extension the Eucharist). But Griffiths denies that the one, true Church is such on the basis of the fact that "its sacraments are more efficacious than those celebrated by others"! He can't seem to hit the happy medium between going too far and not going far enough.

With regard to the "other religious traditions" (by which I mean those traditions that are religious but neither ecclesiae nor communitates ecclesiales), I worry about Griffiths' eagerness to adopt what seems like an understanding of the nature of the faith that is divorced from an affirmation or denial of the truth of its witness. Why would it be an insult to the faith to understand it as something that we affirm or deny? What else is our confession but an affirmation of the truth of the Gospel and a denial of any purported way, truth, or life outside of Christ? And what else is the Church but the communion of this confession?

A few items...

2011-06-18T22:30:00.000-05:00

Two substantial works on Andreas Carlstadt are out from Amy Nelson Burnett this year- a translation of his pamphlets on the Eucharist published by Truman State, and a study on the same topic published by Oxford. (Readers of Carlstadt should also note that The Essential Carlstadt is up on Scribd)

Markus Vinzent (who recently took up a post at King's College London), has done an awful lot of work to set up Oxford Patristics- the Conference Blog, which features all of the abstracts for the 2011 meeting. Note the papers by Prof. Willemien Otten, Romulus Stefanut, and David Newheiser of the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Some shifts of leadership in Hyde Park seminaries... Frank Yamada has been elected as the next president of McCormick Theological Seminary, and James Kenneth Echols has ended his 14 year tenure as president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Chicago. Philip Hougen has been appointed as the acting president during the presidential search process.

Darren Sumner shares information about two forthcoming volumes of essays by John Webster.

The International Yearbook for Tillich Research has moved from LIT Verlag to De Gruyter.

The latest issue of Modern Theology features a symposium on Stanley Cavell's work as it relates to theology and religion.

Interesting to note: the Tillich Yearbook mentioned above has more than doubled in price now that it is published by De Gruyter. Thankfully, at 90 USD it still remains one of the most affordable theology journals out there. In contrast Modern Theology, also mentioned above, charges more than any other major theology journal that I know of for institutional subscriptions. Your library could buy the six volume backlist of the Tillich Yearbook almost three times over for the price of one volume of Modern Theology (Modern Theology graciously offers a discounted price for institutions in the "developing world," at which a year's subscription would only pay for the entire backlist of the Tillich Yearbook one and a half times over). Moral: Frustrated that your library can't afford to own the theological literature that you need to do your work? Let the editorial boards know how you feel.

Terrence Tice has revised his translation of Schleiermacher's Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study and published it with Westminster John Knox. The translation began with John Knox in its first edition (1966) but was published in a second edition (1990) with Edwin Mellen. It's good to see the volume back at a reputable press with better prices, cover designers who aren't asleep at the wheel, and bookbinding jobs that don't make you cringe.

Designations for Anglican groups

2011-06-15T16:39:00.001-05:00

I'm currently editing a chapter manuscript for an edited volume. In the chapter I compare the Anglican Communion Covenant and the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus. Because I deal with ecclesial groups that are within the Anglican tradition but outside of the Anglican Communion, some complicated maneuvering is required simply to clarify who exactly I'm talking about. Opinions are nuanced in the various groups and certain assertions that may be largely correct will not provide an exhaustive account for these churches. I attempt to boil down the taxonomy of relevant non-Communion Anglican groups for the purposes of this chapter in an early footnote, and I thought I'd post the current version here to see if it seems clear and correct. I'm thankful to the editors for offering helpful corrections on this footnote already. If anyone knowledgeable of current happenings in Anglicanism has anything that they would add or change in the following note, please feel free to make suggestions!

In particular: is the international presence of the Anglican Continuum simply made up of missionary endeavors based in North America, or are there free-standing churches elsewhere? If the latter, were these churches "founding" members, that is, is a clarification of the origins of the Anglican Continuum necessary? ––or simply of the fact that other non-North American member churches have joined more recently?

[3] Concise identification of these bodies presents significant problems, as there are dozens of churches that identify themselves as Anglican, but not in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The term “Continuing Anglican” refers to those churches that broke from the American Episcopal Church and subsequently the Anglican Communion in the 1970s following women’s ordination, in particular. I will use the relevant acronyms to describe those bodies that have broken off from the Anglican Communion more recently, most notably the Anglican Mission in America (hereafter, AMiA) and the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (hereafter, CANA). There is no shared point of origin for these latter groups. They are most closely associated with the present dispute over sexuality in the Communion following the consecration of Gene Robinson to the episcopate, although AMiA predates this event. To varying degrees, these groups are working towards creating a new Anglican province in North America, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The ACNA is currently in full communion with the provinces of Nigeria and Uganda, but not with the Archbishop of Canterbury. These designations do not exhaust the number of Anglican churches beyond the Anglican Communion, but will suffice for the purposes of this essay. Finally, “Traditionalist Anglican” refers to Anglicans within the Anglican Communion who share many of the sentiments of Continuing Anglicans, the ACNA, etc.

Thoughts on Nietzsche

2011-06-12T01:14:00.002-05:00

I sent in my paper for a course on Nietzsche that I've been taking with Ryan Coyne, thus ending my first year of studies as a doctoral student (and maybe my recent absence from blogging?). I had read a bit of Nietzsche before, but this course was a good chance to get into a representative spread of his texts and familiarize myself further. We read Birth of Tragedy, the "Truth and Lying" essay, Daybreak, Gay Science, Beyond Good & Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and Anti-Christ. After a more limited personal engagement with his other works in researching for the paper, I think that the course bibliography was well chosen. Of course there are holes, and one unread text or another might seem to be "essential", but given that we're working with a ten-week quarter system, I think the selections were well made. There was also ample reference to the notebooks, Ecce Homo, and other works during lectures and discussion, so doors were open to further reading on one's own.

I thought I'd share a few thoughts on Nietzsche that occurred to me over the semester, with the caution that this spring has been my only extended and solid engagement with Nietzsche, so there is surely more and better to be said on all of these points.

§ I won't get into my paper topic too much, but I decided to write on Nietzsche's philosophy of science through the lens of some paragraphs from The Gay Science. I had three main reasons for writing on a topic like this. First, I wanted to avoid any discussion of Nietzsche and theology/God/religion/etc.. There is obviously a lot for a theologian to write on Nietzsche, and theologians should surely be doing this, but I wanted to get out of that mindset and write more about Nietzsche on his own terms. I didn't want to just come at him with issues that I had because of my own theological concerns. Second, I wanted to avoid the doctrines that Nietzsche is best known for, that overtook his later works, and that have created a thicket of various opinions on The-Meaning-Of-Nietzsche. Again, it's not that these doctrines are unimportant or that a complete picture of Nietzsche's thought could be achieved without them. But I wanted simply to think alongside Nietzsche in a more mundane way and draw out some themes that were less liable to distortion at the hands of their own importance. Third, I wanted to pick a topic that could seep out into his wider oeuvre rather than pinpoint a single problem for a surgical encounter. I find that I can quite readily identify problems in texts and play with them, modify them, "solve" them, etc.. This approach, I think, comes naturally to the genre of the research article, and when article-length engagements are the bread and butter of scholarly writing, one's mindset is shaped much more according to article-length problems. I wanted to resist that approach and write on something that could expand to a more widely interpretive scope as an exercise in engaging with a thinker rather than just being a wonk of theoretical puzzles.

§ On Nietzsche as a theologian (to indulge, since I actively tried to avoid the theological cookie-cutter throughout the semester): it is impressive how much Nietzsche lends himself to theological considerations, and how much he himself acted as a theologian. By way of preface to a reflection on God and the devil in Ecce Homo he writes the following warning: "Theologically speaking -- listen carefully, because I do not speak like a theologian very often --" The only problem is that this simply isn't true. I found that Nietzsche quite often spoke like a theologian. I daresay one could guess that Nietzsche's father was a Lutheran pastor without any biographical familiarity; simply by knowing Nietzsche's thoughts on morality or the Crucified, it was obvious enough.

§ An interesting paper, if someone hasn't already written it, would consider the move from "nay-saying" to "yea-saying" made by both Nietzsche and Barth over the course of their respective careers. The comparison could draw some unexpected and provocative connections between the two thinkers. The identity of the Anti-Christ might also play heavily into this comparative intellectual biography, though obviously in very different ways when one man self-identified with what the other man feared around many corners.

§ While I found a good bit of Nietzsche needlessly bombastic and was at times unsure that his aphorisms went much deeper than a certain cleverness of style, I am convinced that Nietzsche deserves all of the shelf space he is given in the philosophy section of the average Barnes & Noble, or all of the naive enthusiasm he meets in the freshman student taking Philosophy 101. Nor can his scholarly reception be explained away as mere postmodern trendiness; he belongs in the pantheon, and far from one of its lower seats.

§ Two articles that I enjoyed reading for my paper were Werner Stegmaier's "Nietzsche's Doctrines, Nietzsche's Signs", and R. Lanier Anderson's "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science". Both were published earlier and are here found in their most recent versions.

§ As I mentioned in my last post, I have really benefited from the online material on Nietzsche, especially Nietzsche Source, which made working with the primary texts a good deal easier than having that many more physical volumes piled around my desk. Besides simply referring back to the German as I worked through the primary passages for my research, I found myself making use of a technology that was unavailable to many past interpreters of Nietzsche, even of the relatively recent past: a full text search function. The ability to search Trieb nach Erkenntniss (to give one example) across Nietzsche's corpus was terribly useful, but I found myself questioning exactly what implications for scholarship were inherent in such tools. It is likely that I ran across a textual connection or two that has remained unexploited, even by a Nietzsche reader of Walter Kaufmann's caliber. Is this right? One almost feels fraudulent citing a range of texts that is much wider than what one has worked through from start to finish. It obviously wasn't my depth of familiarity with Nietzsche that earned me this knowledge, nor my superior interpretive skills. Yet the knowledge sits in my lap and surely shouldn't be dismissed simply because I didn't get a hold of it the old-fashioned way. Best, I think, is to make use of these tools as far as possible while still retaining a humility about the task. A rule of thumb: If I have a good sense of the limits of my abilities to contextualize a passage that I run across in a text search, then I likely also have a good sense of the extent to which I can responsibly employ that passage within an argument that I am trying to make. A rule of thumb on Nietzsche with regard to the preceding: his use of aphorisms and paragraphs makes the question of contextualization simpler in some ways because of their fragmented nature... but in other ways deceptively simple.

Nietzsche online at De Gruyter

2011-05-14T10:07:00.001-05:00

I will get back to substantive posting at some point, but this link post seemed worth putting up. Nietzsche resources online are quite extensive... Nietzsche Source already offers the Colli & Montinari critical edition online for free, and there are numerous English translations to be found in open access.

De Gruyter has recently published Nietzsche Online, which is a great database with the critical edition, the Nietzsche-Wörterbuch that will feature online-first updates in the coming years, and related material such as the complete works of Paul Rée as well as secondary literature. The database is unaffordable except for institutions with pretty deep pockets, but De Gruyter is offering a free 30-day trial access to it. There is a short registration process to go through, but then you can get into everything. I don't see any dates attached to the trial access, so I think the access is probably available for 30 days after registering yourself.

When I was fooling around with it last night I thought that Nietzsche Online had scanned manuscripts of the notebooks in addition to transcriptions, but I can't find them any more. Either I mixed up windows and the manuscripts I was looking at were actually from Nietzsche Source, or there is something wrong with the database today, or I'm simply forgetting how I navigated to the manuscripts. In any case, Nietzsche Online may or may not provide some manuscript material that is already freely available elsewhere.

Michaelis - Syntagma Commentationum

2011-05-10T23:36:00.003-05:00

My newest acquisition, for $10 from the library's used book sale. The volume is in wonderful condition and consists of collected writings of Johann David Michaelis in German and Latin. The collection seems to have been published in portions over the course of a decade or so, beginning in 1759. I don't foresee myself making any immediate research use of this, but it's one of those sorts of items that I try to be on the look-out for, purely as a matter of maintaining a collection. I think this is the oldest volume I own.

Theological work and general academic publishers

2011-05-05T00:40:00.001-05:00

I recently learned from Tim Furry that the Wiley-Blackwell Challenges in Contemporary Theology series is coming to an end. Only a day or two later I noticed that Cambridge is also ending its Current Issues in Theology series.

These are pretty significant cuts. There are certainly many places to publish theological work, but one thing that I take to be important about the Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge series is that they are well-respected avenues of theological publication, edited by some of the most prominent theologians doing English-language work, and put out by publishers that are not themselves particularly identified with religious or theological work. That is, they are not like Eerdmans, Fortress, or St. Vladimir's, where the publisher's identity is closely tied to its theology catalogue and anyone working with them is likely invested or conversant in theological or other religious work. I think that the discipline of theology will be at its healthiest when there are numerous publication options at publishers like Cambridge or Wiley-Blackwell. Religious houses are of course important and will probably always provide the bulk of our published literature, but a presence amongst the other disciplines in the offerings of general academic publishers is an essential representation for theology to maintain. Numerous places remain for pursuing this interdisciplinary standard: publishers like Continuum, Ashgate, Routledge, and Oxford (and to a lesser extent Duke, Indiana, Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) continue to offer theological work... Cambridge and Wiley-Blackwell will also surely continue to do so despite cutting their respective contemporary theology series (both carry important theological journals, too). But the cuts are undeniably striking, especially because the editors for these book series are synonymous with a current constructive theological mainstream that seeks to bring theology into its own again and pursue work that is in conversation with, though not merely derivative of, other disciplines. My concern is that the loss of these series might signal a trend towards theology being published by general academic houses primarily when it is embraced for this relatively weaker relevance of derivative relationships to other fields.

A few items...

2011-05-02T00:17:00.002-05:00

Posting has succumbed to busyness, and may yet for a week or so. In the meantime, here are a few items (pretty lean on all things Protestant, now that I stop to consider)...

Issues 13.2 of The Ecclesiastical Law Journal is out. There is free access to an article by University of Chicago's own Richard Helmholz, author of far too much celebrated work on canon law to even bother trying to mention here.

Denis Müller has an article in the latest issue of Revue d'éthique et de théologie morale on the German-speaking Catholic reception of Karl Barth from Przywara to Balthasar, considering Benjamin Dahlke's 2010 work on the same subject.

The Kallistos Ware lecture at Wheaton College is now up online.

ET Studies is a new journal published by Peeters for the European Society for Catholic Theology.

Ignatius Press has published Anglicans and the Roman Catholic Church, a volume of essays relating to the Anglican liturgy and the new ordinariates established by Anglicanorum Coetibus. You may recognize Aidan Nichol's contribution from its previous publication in New Blackfriars... more recently it has shown up on some Anglo-Catholic blogs because of some recent lectures he's given about it (in response to Nichols, one should really read Nicholas Lash's strong critique of the idea of uniatism for former Anglicans). Other chapters have also been previously published, though in an Anglo-Catholic journal called Anglican Embers that is less widely known.

Shawn Goodwin has pointed out to me the digital book repository of the National Library of Israel. I'm not one to make a competent judgment, but it looks like there are and will be a lot of important historical material here to use. I've also never used DjVu, so it's been fun to look around and see how the digitization works.

birthdaying this weekend

Woodward Theological Society lecture series

2011-04-20T06:44:00.001-05:00

More news out of Detroit... the Woodward Theological Society is about to start its lecture series, "designed to highlight local and regional scholarship, to promote theological discussions in Metro Detroit, and to network interested individuals together." Their first lecturer will be Mary Healy S.T.D., who will speak on May 7th on "The Hermeneutic of Jesus". From the website: "Her talk, The Hermeneutic of Jesus, argues for a Christological reading of the Old Testament taking a detailed look at Jesus’ own manner of interpreting the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark."

You can find more information about the lecture series, Dr. Healy, and a flyer for the event at the WTS website. Be sure to also poke around and read their previous interviews with James K.A. Smith and J. Todd Billings. Thanks to Mike Dagle and Dean Simmer for all of the work that they're doing for theological training in the Detroit area.

News on my brother...

2011-04-11T10:56:00.001-05:00

This isn't theology related, but I thought I'd take a chance to brag about some of my brother's recent academic-related work. He's putting me to shame lately.

First, Daniel was accepted into the doctoral program for economics at American University earlier this spring, and he'll be leaving his current research post at the Urban Institute to start there this fall. As if that wasn't enough, a paper he published last fall critiquing some recent articles on the 1920-1921 depression was picked up by Paul Krugman (it has also received a good deal of attention elsewhere already, mostly within Austrian circles that are the target of his critique).

Finally, just the other day Daniel was invited to be on the board of advisers for the Critical Review, which seems (just my general sense of it- I'm not familiar with the journal) to be a venue for discussion of politics, economics, and society that is "academic" but directed more towards public intellectual conversation than the more insular specialist work.

Since I'll botch a description of Daniel's work, I'll just cut-and-paste from his own description.

I am on the macroeconomics track, and plan on doing field work in labor economics and either monetary economics or econometrics. My research interests include job and worker flows, the business cycle, the science and engineering workforce, labor market policy evaluation, the history of economic thought, and American economic history. I'm still getting a sense of what I want to write my dissertation on, but I'm interested in working on the role that hiring and separation plays in wage adjustment. Recent work by Robert Shimer has supported the idea that wage rigidity plays an important role in the business cycle. What interests me is the question of how firms respond to wage rigidity, and whether worker turnover is a wage adjustment strategy when firms are constrained in modifying existing labor contracts. I'm also interested in learning more about the sort of shocks that Shimer looks at, and perhaps look into demand shocks, financial market shocks, etc. if these are neglected. It's a body of work I need to look into more and think more about.

Wolterstorff & O'Donovan at Chicago

2011-04-07T14:00:00.002-05:00

I'm doing a bad job of keeping up with local lecture events. I only just now found out that John Webster was at Wheaton this Tuesday for a talk.

Do note, though, that the theology workshop and the ethics club at the University of Chicago are hosting Nicholas Wolterstorff and Oliver O'Donovan next Thursday for a dialogue on “Justice and Love in the Christian Tradition.” The event is free and open to the public, so not to be missed.

Invitation for prospective Div School students...

2011-04-04T22:26:00.001-05:00

I was reminded that this Friday is Prospective Students' Day at the University of Chicago Divinity School. As April 15th draws near we're hosting those students who have been accepted so they can see Swift Hall, meet faculty and students, and hopefully make the decision to stick around for a graduate program if the school seems right for them. During the last Prospective Students' Day I was happy to meet a student or two who were readers of this blog, and I thought I'd speak up ahead of time this year in case any readers will be visiting this Friday. I'll be around during the day and would love to meet you! There's usually some relatively open time in the afternoon, and I'll buy you a coffee (or early... I do mornings and I'm free until 9). Just email me.

I don't think UChicago has the critical mass of theology bloggers that places like Princeton, Notre Dame, Duke, or Marquette do, so I try to bring attention to the program as much as possible. With any luck I've convinced a few of you to apply along the way.

Forthcoming books by Kevin Hector

2011-04-02T21:55:00.001-05:00

Some news about a few of Kevin Hector's book projects has shown up. A little while back I mentioned his introduction to Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion, and unfortunately T&T Clark seems to have pushed the publication date for this project to November 2012. Some better news is that Cambridge has posted some details of his Theology Without Metaphysics, to be released in their Current Issues in Theology series later this year. Prof. Hector also has a project with a tentative title of Modernism as a Theological Problem that hasn't surfaced yet on any publisher websites to my knowledge. You can also find a book titled On God-Talk listed in various places, but I'm guessing that this is the same as what has now become Theology Without Metaphysics (Prof. Hector can correct me on this if I'm mistaken).

Following is the description of Theology Without Metaphysics given on the Cambridge website. You can find a more extensive discussion from Prof. Hector in his 2009 interview with Circa.

One of the central arguments of post-metaphysical theology is that language is inherently 'metaphysical' and consequently that it shoehorns objects into predetermined categories. Because God is beyond such categories, it follows that language cannot apply to God. Drawing on recent work in theology and philosophy of language, Kevin Hector develops an alternative account of language and its relation to God, demonstrating that one need not choose between fitting God into a metaphysical framework, on the one hand, and keeping God at a distance from language, on the other. Hector thus elaborates a 'therapeutic' response to metaphysics: given the extent to which metaphysical presuppositions about language have become embedded in common sense, he argues that metaphysics can be fully overcome only by defending an alternative account of language and its application to God, so as to strip such presuppositions of their apparent self-evidence and release us from their grip.

Buying Quest for the Living God...

2011-03-31T21:43:00.006-05:00

WIT has done a great service in bringing the current situation with Sr. Elizabeth Johnson and the USCCB to the attention of theology bloggers (here, etc.). The one thing I lament is that they link to Amazon.com of all places ~~to buy~~ for The Quest for the Living God!

Regular readers know that I harbor strong criticisms of the Amazon.coms/WalMarts of the book industry, and I realize that the "buy indie" message can get a little preachy and tiring when you just want to buy stuff cheap. But here is a perfect opportunity for anyone interested in Johnson's work to also opt out of needlessly supporting the damaging effects of Amazon.com on folks who are just trying to break even publishing the books that are so important for our theological vocations. And do remember, you will also want these publishers/booksellers to be vibrant, healthy, and affordable when your first/next book comes out!

Amazon (which I will not link from here) is currently selling the paperback of The Quest at $19.95. Note, however, that this is the same price that Continuum has on the paperback edition, and it's also the same price that independent bookstores are charging for it (check your zipcode to be sure, but everything near me lists $19.95).

I'm reading up on Johnson's work (and the USCCB criticism) with some interest, as I don't have much previous familiarity with her. You can find information at her webpage. Go to WIT for updates as this progresses.

-----------

As I said, I don't have much familiarity with Johnson's work and so can't comment too much myself, but one thing that I thought was interesting about the USCCB critique and Johnson's response was the mention of imprimatur/discussion. The USCCB news release states:

"“The Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine is first and foremost concerned about the spiritual welfare of those students using this book who may be led to assume that its content is authentic Catholic teaching,” he said. “Although an imprimatur is not required for all books that treat Sacred Scripture and theology, it is still a recommended practice (see c. 827 §3). By seeking an imprimatur, the author has the opportunity to engage in dialogue with the bishop concerning the Catholic teaching expressed in the book. Thus, clarifications concerning the text can be made prior to its publication. It would have been helpful if Sister Elizabeth Johnson had taken advantage of this opportunity.”

He added that “The Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine is always open to dialogue with theologians and would welcome an opportunity to discuss Sister Elizabeth’s writings with her.”"

Johnson's response states:

"I would have been glad to enter into conversation to clarify critical points, but was never invited to do so. This book was discussed and finally assessed by the Committee before I knew any discussion had taken place."

Both parties claim that the other should have approached dialogue first in the instance of any possible concern of doctrinal errors, but it strikes me that 1) given imprimatur is not required of all books, and 2) given that Johnson's vocation as a theologian presumably includes peer review (i.e., expert scrutiny of her theological work before and after publication), it's difficult to understand how Sr. Johnson was avoiding engagement with the gatekeepers of theological work so as to be less than "helpful". While I am actually in strong support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy taking part in theological matters and the ongoing conversation about contours of orthodox belief (and Johnson expresses thankfulness of their involvement as well), it strikes me that a lot of this stems from a severe misunderstanding (or perhaps less presumptive: a severe disagreement) about the critical nature of theological work and the exchange that leads to the development of Christian doctrine. These sorts of power struggles are nothing new and have existed as long as the Church... and not just the Protestant churches!... has used the university as a laboratory of theological reflection (which I suppose can count as solace or an added frustration depending on how much of an optimist one is). I do hope that as this matter proceeds Sr. Johnson will get a fair hearing with the bishops and everyone will benefit from the exchange.

Until then, don't be a gluttonous dupe of reckless capitalism and let this happen. Buy the book from here or here instead.

A few items...

2011-03-22T21:43:00.006-05:00

Millinerd discusses the possibilities of localism in theological work.

The Angelicum Newsletter notes a recent press conference on the new decree on the reform of ecclesiastical studies of philosophy. According to Charles Morerod's statements at the event, "A non-Christian philosopher cannot be useful to theology." (I'm assuming they're willing to make an exception for folks like Aristotle!) The document has been issued by the Congregation for Catholic Education, which doesn't seem to have it up online yet.

I mentioned a little while back that I was looking for a copy of Kurt Koch's plenary address to the 50th anniversary of the PCPCU this past autumn. I was able to secure a pdf of the speech, but I just ran across a more official publication of it today. I've ILL'd it and will hopefully get to see it before too long. Cardinal Koch has recently succeeded Walter Kasper as the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and he is quite a significant change of pace from his predecessor. He will be worth watching over the next few years for those concerned with ecumenical matters.

The latest issue of the Anglican Theological Review considers same-sex relationships and the nature of marriage. Co-authored essays from what they call "traditionalist" and "liberal" perspectives are offered, with responses from both groups as well as outside responses from others.

The latest issue of Inquiry considers the secular and the sacred. While I don't think this is another theme issue on The Secular Age, Taylor does have an essay in the issue and it looks like a few of the articles deal with his book in a significant way.

Tim Larsen published an article in IHE last month on "Why We Said No"... an honest look at what hiring committees may be thinking when you get rejected from an academic position. Not a fun or uplifting read, perhaps, but it may offer some useful information for those currently on the market. I imagine some of it applies a bit to applicants for graduate programs as well. Also note some responses in the comment section making requests for more specific advertisements of job positions. I imagine this is tough for committees to a certain extent because, as Larsen mentions, they don't always have a clear idea of what exactly a department needs until they hash it out amongst each other with applications in hand. But worth noting, and perhaps considering if you are on faculty somewhere.

The 2011 Colin Gunton Memorial Essay Prize theme was recently announced by IJST, "the theology of providence". Also, congratulations to Ashley Cocksworth for his article, "Attending to the Sabbath: an alternative direction in Karl Barth’s theology of prayer", which won the 2010 prize.

Villanova's Patristics, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference has opened its 2011 call for papers on the theme of "Natura: the splendor of these created things". Submissions are due June 15th.

The difficulty of Google for historical theologians

2011-03-21T09:41:00.002-05:00

My apologies to anyone who has had difficulty commenting on my last post, The difficulty of history for theologians. One comment had a whole paragraph cut off from it in the process of posting, and another one keeps getting deleted despite repeated attempts to post it. If there are any other comments that haven't gone through of which I'm not aware, sorry about that... Google seems to be acting up. I rarely ever have problems with this sort of thing or with spam on the blog, so I suppose it could be worse.

It's a particular shame that this happened for the post in question. Whenever I bring up the topic of theology as it relates to historical work, a lot of interest from readers seems to surface. In this post I've also had some fruitful email correspondence in addition to the comment section. I have a sense that (at least for certain corners of the theological world), broad problems of "historical theology" are of great significance these days, especially for graduate students rising into the profession... at least people seem to be asking an inordinate amount of questions about how theological and historical projects can work together. This may warrant more extensive discussion of theology/history issues. I wonder what further directions people would be interested in taking such a conversation. Are there particular problems that you've encountered in your own work? Areas of study in theology/history that should be highlighted? Methodological insight from other disciplines that have been going unnoticed by theologians? I have also heard talk from various graduate students of forming a more long-term colloquium of sorts on these kinds of questions. I'd be happy to entertain these sorts of ideas as well.

This can be an open thread on theology/history... you may also want to post comments for the last post here as a potentially less technologically-hostile comment section.

The difficulty of history for theologians

2011-03-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

These are thoughts that actually came up after I wrote about theology and philosophy earlier this month, although they could be applied to most any ancillary discipline with which theology often finds itself concerned. A basic difficulty for doing theology seems to be that it requires a good deal of legwork in other disciplines just to get its own work off the ground, which inevitably means that theologians trying to take adequate account of philosophical, historical, text-critical, or other contributions to human knowledge relevant for the explication of the doctrine of the faith will come across as dilettantes who know just enough of another discipline to hurt themselves. For the moment I'd like to think about this difficulty as it relates to historical work done by the constructive theologian.

One of the things that I find challenging about theological work is that for the most part, we are never simply offering a theoretical account of some aspect of the doctrine of the faith. Most theologians, that is, wouldn't write a treatise meant simply to offer a coherent explanation of "revelation". Rather, any coherent explanation of revelation coming from a theologian would likely consider an historical tradition of thought leading up to the present constructive presentation. In some cases this reliance upon previous work on doctrinal concepts is more implicit than not, but theology on the whole remains a strongly diachronic conversation- and more so than other disciplines (although any discipline will engage with the previous literature in some way) because of theology's status as a discipline born out of and informing a doctrinal community. This history of theology isn't simply raw material for analysis; it is something that also holds theology to account through certain orthodoxies or pious expectations for theology's development of the self-understanding of the faith. (Incidentally, this is why I think that the idea of theology as a re-conceptualization of the faith for the present day is a bit unhelpful. It leans too much upon a metaphor of succeeding pictures of the faith, and does not adequately convey the extent to which tradition is not a mere correspondence of ideas with where-we-stand-now, but rather a recognition that the faith lives now, and we can engage with it.)

But the work of the theologian as constantly accounting for and being held to account by an extra-theological faith tradition makes the intellectual work much less straightforward than someone simply engaged in history. A theologian for whom the proliferation of 20th century Augustinianisms is relevant (however much some of these 20th century versions are only really pseudo-augustinian) is never going to be able to match up with an Augustine scholar's ability to offer an historical account of Augustine's thought within its original context. Too many competing receptions of Augustine remain important for the theologian to incorporate that are simply irrelevant for the historian of Augustine, who only really needs to see these receptions as later history that got Augustine himself either more or less wrong.

To make matters even more gloomy for the theologian, you rarely see a constructive theologian that remains simply Augustinian to the extent that you might see an historian whose published work doesn't venture outside of the third to fifth centuries centuries at all (with half of the work being about Augustine himself). It's not just the whole of the Augustinian tradition that keeps theologians from acquiring an adequate historical account of Augustine, then, but also a sustained attention to Pauline thought, or a denominational context of Methodism, or an interest in theological bioethics... and would a constructive theologian with all four of these already-incredibly-broad areas of study represented in their CV look at all out of the ordinary or generalist as far as theologians go? Hardly. One could easily add to such distractions from a comprehensive historical engagement.

I don't know if there's much to do about this difficulty, and I don't see it as a bad thing. I think that theologians should be focused on a wide variety of topics if they're going to offer any sort of compelling systematic account of the faith in their career. Theologians whose expertise is limited in scale to the equivalent of "the Petrine epistles", or "the problem of evil", or "late antiquity" don't really possess the tools to offer a constructive account of the doctrine of the faith, and theologians who do intend to offer a constructive account of the doctrine of the faith don't have the resources to speak to 1 Peter in the way that a biblical scholar might who has spent the last five peer-reviewed articles and a book writing about it.

I'm something of a generalist, so I take this to be an exciting challenge for the work of theology and not anything limiting. But discouragement does continue to pop up for me every time I present an occasional sort of paper on a topic that others have devoted entire careers to unpacking. Anxiety in such instances is, I think, best channeled towards better theological work and not towards an inferiority complex with regard to neighboring disciplines.

Two comments on academic theology...

2011-03-15T15:39:00.004-05:00

Chicago is on a quarter system, so we're in exam week at the moment- hence the lack of posts around here. Below are two quotes from two different theologians to dissuade all of you academic folk from thinking that your work really matters all that much to Jesus.

"I fancied myself a Christian when I picked profound and beautiful sayings out of Jeremiah's writing, for a disputation, lecture, or sermon, or for other speeches and writings, and I thought that this ought to please God extremely well. But when I began to think and reflect properly, I discovered that I had neither come to know God nor to love the highest good as a good. I saw that the created letter was what I had come to know and love; in that I rested; it had become my God and I did not notice that God said through Jeremiah, Those who kept my commandments, knew me not and did not ask for me."
--Andreas Carlstadt, "The Meaning of the Term Gelassen and Where in Holy Scripture it is Found", The Essential Carlstadt, (Herald) p. 140.

"Christ did not write a book, nor did He bid the disciples or apostles to write one, yet He gave many precepts concerning the Church; hence when about to send apostles out to plant the Church, He did not say, Go write, but Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature."
--John Eck, Enchiridion of Commonplaces, (Baker), p. 12

A few items...

2011-03-01T10:38:00.002-06:00

Dale at Trinities (a blog concerned with trinitarian doctrine from an analytic philosophical perspective) recently drew attention to a post that was highly critical of theologians who "ignore" analytic theology. The post is worth wandering over to read. I have a lot of difficulties with these sorts of gripes from folks who work in the analytic tradition. I don't doubt that negligent theologies are out there (and even prominent), and surely we could do a better job of drawing from a wider critical conversation. But this strikes me as a relatively uninteresting point to make, and almost certainly not attributable to the reasons that Dale suggests. The explanation that tends to bother me the most is his second suggested reason for theology's negligence, that "philosophy is hard". I've written about this in the past. With the proliferation of good conceptual, analytical, and critical work being done in multiple disciplines, it's as if those wanting to emphasize "philosophy" as a distinct, delimitable discipline have found nothing better upon which to capitalize than the fact that good philosophical work is rigorous. The appeal to difficulty is awkward enough as a nondescript description of philosophical work. It becomes downright ugly when it's used as an attempted psychoanalysis of "why nobody pays attention to me." And do note: the problem isn't that Dale is incorrect about philosophy being difficult or theologians ignoring it for this reason. Lots of theologians do ignore analytic philosophy because they're lazy and it's too difficult. But the same could be said for any number of other disciplines that tend to be ignored or do the ignoring. A more reasonable (and useful) explanation for theological ignorance of analytic work would focus on why theologians don't find this work relevant (either because of its methods, its assumptions, its own ignorance of theological concerns, etc.), or don't find current parallel conversations in theology or philosophy inadequate enough to necessitate bringing in analytic thinkers.

Works of Peter Damien are 25% off at CUA Press for the rest of the week.

The latest issue of The Journal of Religion is a theme issue on Augustine, publishing papers from the recent conference here at the Divinity School.

I recently wrote about the idea of the essence of Christianity as an interesting episode of modern theology. JKnott has offered some thoughts on his own blog on "Radicalism and the Idea". I've also run across a 1984 study by Stephen Sykes of exactly the sort of thing I was talking about... surely others were already familiar with this, but for those who weren't, it may be worth taking a look at The Identity of Christianity: Theologians and the Essence of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth.

Upcoming thematic conferences at Notre Dame, Princeton, Princeton, Fordham, and Dayton.

I mentioned a while back that after five years, the journal Contributions to the History of Concepts was no longer being published by Brill, and that there was no indication that it was being published any more at all. I'm therefore quite pleased to find that Contributions has resurfaced and will now be published by Berghahn. The journal, as before, is a publication of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group, and is now also hosted by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Ambiguity in Anglicanorum Coetibus

2011-02-26T16:58:00.003-06:00

A lot of the criticism of Anglicanorum coetibus (besides the basic criticism that it's a sheep stealing venture) has been directed towards the vagueness with which the constitution speaks of Anglican identity. The following concern falls generally into this criticism of vagueness, although its implications strike me as more serious for the establishment of these personal ordinariates than other points that have been raised.

Who, exactly, is the pope intending to address in this document?

The opening line from which the title is taken speaks of "Anglicanorum coetibus"... "groups of Anglicans" in the English. Yet in I. §4 we read that the ordinariates are made up of those "originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church".

Saying that membership in the ordinariate requires initial membership in the Anglican Communion is a good deal more specific than speaking of "groups of Anglicans" more generally. And the distinction is relevant given that the petitioning Anglican groups referenced in the opening line of the constitution are, in large part, the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC)- surely a group of Anglicans, but not Anglicans belonging to the Anglican Communion.

The only thing that seems to signal a solution to the problem is the phrase "originally belonging". Insofar as traditionalist Anglican bodies originated in the Anglican Communion before breaking away to form their own groups, perhaps they are adequately included in the description of I. §4. But even here, it's not clear who is being addressed. I. §4 speaks on a rather individualist level... of laity, clerics, members of orders... is it appropriate to assume that the constitution is speaking of groups like TAC in their entirety as originally belonging to the Anglican Communion? Or must every converting member to the ordinariate demonstrate such an individual pedigree?

And even here the reference to original belonging isn't clear. The actual text reads "qui olim ad Anglicanam Communionem pertinebant et nunc plena cum Ecclesia Catholica communione fruuntur"

Now, Latinists can correct me, but I gather that "olim" speaks of those belonging to the Anglican Communion at one time or previously, rather than "originally". Other translations seem to follow the English, though ("ursprünglich zur Anglikanischen Gemeinschaft gehörten"; "appartenaient à l'origine à la Communion anglicane"; "originariamente appartenenti alla Comunione Anglicana"; etc.). These discrepancies may be less damaging for the intentions of constitution (indeed, the Latin version seems less restrictive than the translated versions). But the ambiguity remains disconcerting.

Thoughts?

A Re-Reading Guide to Schleiermacher

2011-02-25T12:17:00.003-06:00

Schleiermacher's two open letters to Lücke On the Glaubenslehre make for a good introduction to reading The Christian Faith. Given that common portrayals of Schleiermacher are deeply colored by critics contemporary to him, through Barth, Lindbeck, and present writers, a chance to hear Schleiermacher's own defense of his work as he was in the midst of revising it for the second edition is an invaluable tutor for reading The Christian Faith itself. One can still disagree with Schleiermacher, but one is forced to face Schleiermacher rather than third-hand canned characterizations of him. Likewise, the advice is good that was given to us as we began our seminar on the Glaubenslehre this past fall... reading the Glaubenslehre from cover to cover is a good introduction for reading it through a second time. It is a highly systematic and overpowering dogmatics that does not sprawl and circle around its object like Barth's lectures; as if the ingenuity of Schleiermacher were not enough in itself, he has condensed his insight into a tight structure that is only opened up upon first reading... unpacking and deep interpretation require its revisiting.

I would add to these observations that the letters to Lücke and the original critics of Schleiermacher themselves deserve revisiting after a first run-through of the Glaubenslehre. The main purpose of giving Schleiermacher the first word of interpretation and apology for the Glaubenslehre is to create some space amidst other commentary on his theological project that has piled up. If one hasn't read through The Christian Faith, then the first thing to do is let Schleiermacher speak and assume that what he is claiming for himself will be adequately justified in time. And most likely it will be-- Schleiermacher does not leave much room for dispute about the coherence of the whole of his work. It is difficult to bring into question one aspect of his theology without tugging at the threads of its entirety.

But once one has given him the time to share his vision in its entirety and to work off of the assumption that this vision comes together (and it does), it's perfectly responsible to come back to Schleiermacher with a more critical eye. Just as we shouldn't read the Glaubenslehre merely on the basis of second-hand critique of Schleiermacher, we also shouldn't merely settle for Schleiermacher's own critique of his detractors. James Duke and Francis Fiorenza have done a commendable job putting together a thick set of contextual endnotes for the English translation of the Letters to Lücke. We can easily get at the concerns of Baur or Braniß or Bretschneider through the apparatus of the American editors.

Another resource that has proved really helpful for me (would that all collected works of great thinkers be charitable enough to put together a two-inch thick volume like this!) is KGA I.7,3 - the third volume appended to the 1821/22 Der christliche Glaube in Schleiermacher's works. This volume is divided into two sections: one of marginalia and notes of Schleiermacher's, and the other of over 400 pages of excerpts from over 40 thinkers that receive either explicit or implicit mention by Schleiermacher in the Glaubenslehre.

Some of the more prominent texts here are translated into English somewhere, but many of them aren't available except in the German or Latin provided by KGA. I've also found that while some important works are overlooked in these excerpts, they can often be found easily enough in Google Books or another digital repository... it's all old enough to be on there and downloadable for free.

Chris Donato in Harvard Theological Review

2011-02-20T21:15:00.001-06:00

I like to mention when theology bloggers or friends are published, and I even knew this one was coming ahead of time, but somehow I missed it until today. Sorry Chris.

Chris Donato of the blog Growing Grace-full has an article out in the latest issue of HTR- “Against the Law: Milton's (Anti?) nomianism in De Doctrina Christiana”. Following is the abstract:

This essay seeks to put to rest the notion that John Milton was an antinomian, by offering a concise summation of the relevant chapters of De doctrina Christiana that discuss his views on the covenants, the law and the gospel, and Christian liberty. Defining antinomian is a difficult task, as its manifestations throughout history have not been monolithic. During the seventeenth century in England, two kinds, broadly speaking, existed: 1) doctrinal antinomianism; and 2) licentious antinomianism.

The Eusebius Essay Prize

2011-02-19T17:13:00.000-06:00

From the latest issue of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History:

"The Editors and Editorial Board of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History are delighted to announce a major new prize in the field of early Christian History.

The Journal is offering an annual prize of £500 for the best essay submitted on a subject connected with any aspect of early Christian history, broadly understood as including the first seven centuries AD/CE. Scholars in any relevant discipline (theology, classics, late antique studies, Middle Eastern
Studies etc.), whether established in their field or graduate students, are encouraged to enter the competition. The essays should not exceed 8,000 words, including footnotes, and for 2011 should be submitted by 30 September. A judgement will be made at the end of November of the same year (the editors reserve the right not to award the prize if no essay of significant quality is submitted). The essay of the successful candidate will be published in the Journal, probably in the number appearing in July 2012. Other submissions entered into the competition may also be recommended for publication. All essays should be sent as two hard copies, prepared to journal style, to Mrs Anne Waites, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Robinson College, Cambridge CB3 9AN."

The idea of the essence of Christianity

2011-02-14T17:32:00.002-06:00

I'm reading an old Beacon Press edition of Heinrich Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany that I picked up this summer at Volume 1 Books (a great Michigan bookseller...make sure you don't miss their attic inventory as well, where there's a lot of philosophy and old leftist political literature). The book was originally published as a number of essays intending to introduce German intellectual history to the French public (with no pretensions to a neutral view on anything). Early on, Heine writes:

Voltaire could only wound the body of Christianity. All his sarcasms derived from ecclesiastical history; all his witticisms on dogma and worship, on the Bible, that most sacred book of humanity, on the Virgin Mary, that fairest flower of poetry; the whole dictionary of philosophical arrows which he discharged against the clergy and the priesthood, could only wound the mortal body of Christianity, but were powerless against its interior essence, its deeper spirit, its immortal soul.

For Christianity is an idea, and as such it is indestructible and eternal, as all ideas are. What then is this idea?

One of the courses I'd love to put together and lead one day is a seminar on the idea of the essence of Christianity. The mid-19th to early-20th century Das Wesen des Christentums genre hasn't been in fashion for a while, and the ideas of this essentialism probably aren't especially useful or interesting to contemporary theological work, but as a chapter of intellectual history it's a fascinating topic of consideration and instructive if not directly applicable. Heine offers a striking precursor here to the idea of a Christian "interior essence", and examples of such precursors certainly present themselves before him. As a decidedly German motif, one could even draw its pedigree back to something like Luther's identification of the doctrine of justification as "the head and the cornerstone" of the faith (although I imagine this would be pretty speculative and require a good bit of qualification to connect it to post-Enlightenment attempts to identify the essence of the faith on an ideational level). Setting aside the content and looking at the form of the Wesen tradition, the opposition of history to eternal truths is bread and butter for modern German thought and readily suggests Lessing along with a number of others.

A consideration of this essentialist tradition would also benefit from further discussion of its demise and present alternatives. An emphasis on creed, canon, and structure of the sort that Jaroslav Pelikan pushed is probably a strong contender for the most prominent current heir amongst intellectual traditions that want to say something worthwhile about "Christianity" as a whole. The Nicene Christianity volume of essays is a good recent example of this school of thought as it might synthesize the Christian faith, although one of the most interesting characteristics of a structural focus (rather than a doctrinal or moral focus) is how diverse the outcome will be... Nicene Christianity is only one of many ways to invest canonical rubrics with religious content. On the level of popular discourse, Mere Christianity comes most obviously to mind as a 20th century version of the Das Wesen des Christentums literature.

A few items...

2011-02-08T10:50:00.001-06:00

Heinrich Kuhn notes an odd call by Günter Grass for Hamburg to buy up the Wartburg Institute's library. Not sure quite what to make of this.

Joseph O'Leary responds to Robert Johansen and also offers some more links & context about the controversial new translation of the Roman Missal.

Evangelical Textual Criticism notes two reviews of H.A.G. Houghton's Augustine's Text of John and a response from the author. You can find my 2010 review of the book here.

Josh Furnal has an article out on early view in New Blackfriars: "A Theology of the Table".

Also out on early view is a fascinating article by Daniel G. Van Slyke, "Confirmation: A Sacrament in Search of a Theology?". I came to appreciate these problems while using the sacrament of confirmation as a sort of linchpin for my ecumenical argument in "'Fullness of the Spirit' and 'Fullness of Catholicity' in Ecclesial Communion", and it's good to see a new article out on the theological significance of the rite.

W. Travis McMacken shares thoughts on Barth's interaction with the theological tradition.

Carl Braaten has apparently picked up an old post of Ry's and defended his political views in the comment section. Robert Jenson's nephew also seems to have visited this post back in 2009.

Horst Stephan on Schleiermacher

2011-02-01T10:59:00.000-06:00

I am interested in finding Horst Stephan's Die Lehre Schleiermachers von der Erlösung (Tübingen, 1901), but it is oddly unavailable in the University of Chicago libraries. I would have thought that Brian Gerrish's presence at the Divinity School would have brought the volume to a bibliographer's attention at some point. I can't find a digitized version on Google Books, Europeana, Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, etc. either, which I had hoped would be a possibility because of the book's age.

I've ILL'd the volume and will hopefully get to see it before too long, but I've seen Stephan's work listed on a few bibliographies as recommended for research on Schleiermacher's christology, and so I'm a little concerned at how unreachable it is. I'll have to ask the library to look into buying it as well. Any used copies floating around for a reasonable price? Or reprints/digitizations that I've missed?

Overly polite? Or a necessary clarification?

2011-01-30T15:46:00.000-06:00

It's always bothered me in published work when the author writes (either in an acknowledgments section for a book or an initial/final footnote for an article) something like this:

"I'd like to thank persons A, B, and C, who read drafts of this work and offered helpful comments, suggestions, and criticisms. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own."

If I'm reading someone's work, I'm interested to know who they consulted during the writing and revising stage; such consultation is an important step in academic research, fosters much better writing, and is especially important when journal reviewers so often fail to give extensive comments on article submissions. Recognition of these consultations helpfully signals to the reader those with whom an author is in conversation. But I don't know why anyone would reasonably think that a mistake in the final work should be attributed to those who reviewed drafts along the way. For all the reader knows, the mistake could have been corrected by a reviewer and not incorporated into the final manuscript by the author. Or the reviewer might only have expertise in one aspect of the work and not presume to comment on another aspect of it, which may indeed turn out to be incorrect. The reviewer may also disagree with a conclusion of the author, but have the sense to realize that this is the author's paper and not the reviewer's and while the reviewer could draw attention to problems within the author's thinking, there's no sense in rewriting the paper as if it were the reviewer's own.

Reading manuscripts is a service in the profession and I think everyone recognizes it as such. I've never seen the need to include an ornamental recognition that "the buck stops with me, the author". Of course it does. Which brings me to another gripe... even worse, these acknowledgments often say, "All mistakes are, of course, my own." They refute their own reason for being!

Is this an entirely bizarre pet peeve of mine, or does this have some wider resonance with people? I'm assuming that the practice is just a matter of etiquette when it occurs, but it just doesn't strike me as a very needed clarification. The byline says who takes responsibility for the ideas. The acknowledgment says who spoke constructively with the author at some point. We don't clarify in the byline that review was sought elsewhere; I don't see why we should be redundant about genuine authorship [which entails responsibility for mistakes] in the acknowledgments note.

In Memoriam: Edmund Hill

2011-01-27T20:50:00.000-06:00

Edmund Hill died on 11 November 2010. I hadn't heard the news until running across Fergus Kerr's notice in New Blackfriars. Hill is probably best known for his translations of Augustine, and Kerr has some interesting commentary on Hill's approach to de Trinitate.

Chicago Events...

2011-01-23T14:28:00.000-06:00

A number of good looking events going on at the Divinity and elsewhere on campus this next week:

On Monday, the Early Christian Studies Workshop is hosting Dean Margaret Mitchell, who will be speaking on, "Paul, the Corinthians and the birth of Christian Hermeneutics"

On Tuesday, the Divinity School will host Sonja Luehrmann, who will speak on "Confess, Forget, Remember: The Tainted Past as a Moral Resource in Russian Orthodoxy Anti-Abortion Activism".

At the same time, the Theology Workshop will host Vince Evener, who will speak on “The Eye that Offends Us’: Suffering and the Transformation of Perception in Martin Luther’s Break with the Roman Church”

On Thursday, Vasileios Syros will present his work at the Martin Marty fellowship, "Jewish Political and Religious Thought at the Intersection of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: The interaction of the Jewish and Christian political and religious traditions between the Mediterranean and the Alps."

Two conferences will also be going on... Monday & Tuesday feature one on Sufism and Judaism, and Thursday & Friday feature one on Pierre Hadot and Spiritual Exercises.

I think all of these are free and open to the public, but check the events pages to make sure if you aren't a part of the university community.

A few items...

2011-01-17T18:46:00.001-06:00

The European Commission has come out strong against Google and in renewed support of its own Europeana, which doesn't carry some of the draconian regulations that Google does for preferential use. I blogged about Europeana a bit when it came out two years ago, and the material available today is much more extensive than it was then. You can always find a link to Europeana (along with some other digital libraries) at the bottom of the right sidebar. One of the main strengths that I see in Europeana is that it aggregates the cultural items from various sources around Europe (museums, libraries, archives, etc.). I think the worry with dispersed resources rather than one source like Google is that the knowledge store becomes pretty balkanized and difficult to manage. Europeana, however, links you to the original sites where all of these items were digitized, allowing member institutions to do their own work in their own house, but also bringing it under one digital roof for access. This strikes me as a much more sensible structure than Google's rather monopolistic philosophy.

This is a little old now, but worth reading if you haven't-- the director of the Harvard University Library writes about three threats to research libraries... two related to journal prices, and the third to Google.

Rejuvenation of public intellectual culture and thick, printed, literary reviews.

The latest issue of Revue de Métaphysique et Morale considers "the self", with an unusual amount of English language articles.

The University of Chicago has agreed to buy Meadville Lombard Theological School's main building. This follows a recent building acquisition and cooperative work with Chicago Theological Seminary, and accompanies a lot of other work that the university is doing in the vicinity of campus, including the renovation of buildings just a block away from our apartment for local businesses.

Next Tuesday, the 25th, the Theology Workshop will look at a chapter from Vince Evener's dissertation titled, “The Eye that Offends Us’: Suffering and the Transformation of Perception in Martin Luther’s Break with the Roman Church”. I'll be offering a brief response to lead off the discussion.

Todd Rester of Historical TheoBlogy will be speaking with Jordan Ballor of the University of Zurich on the Post-Reformation Digital Library at Calvin College, February 17th.

Jason Goroncy mentions a brilliant plan to guard libraries against austerity measures.

Sources for Milbank on power

2011-01-10T18:59:00.002-06:00

I've heard that writing a blog post with "Milbank" in the title draws a good bit of traffic, so I'll be curious to see what comes of this. I've never written about Milbank directly on the blog, but I had some thoughts when I read his "Power is necessary for peace" article published at the end of last October.

I know the ship has sailed on this conversation, and there are plenty of more comprehensive and enlightening blog conversations out there from the days following the article's actual publication. This short bit from Milbank struck me when I first read it, though:

"[...]without the addition of power to charity would the church have survived at all? To refuse this addition is in a way to refuse the resurrection, and the fact that in the end it is Christ's kingly role which is eternal, and not his mediating priestly role."

Who says Milbank's work isn't properly christological or focused upon the resurrection?! Actually, I wondered whether this made its way into his explanation partially to counter such characterizations of his work. He cites no source here, but the logic reminded me of the Norman Anonymous, which I considered in my recent article (564-565):

It is also worth noting how the Norman Anonymous distinguishes the extent of the kingly reign as opposed to the priestly. In the last quoted passage, the Anonymous states of Christ, 'regnabit in eternum et ultra. Qui sacerdos dicitur in eternum, non ultra. Neque enim in eterno vel ultra eternum sacerdotium erit necessarium.' The royal role, therefore, goes into eternity while the priestly role extends to eternity, but no further.[32] This ironically grants a greater dignity to kingship even though it is based on the scriptural claim that 'you are a priest forever'. It is also notably in contrast to other contemporary exegetical traditions that are not so much 'papalist' or anti-royalist as they are simply anti-hierocratic. Philippe Buc has described what he calls 'pro-egalitarian' exegetes who rejected the hierarchical conception advocated by Isidore of Seville whereby the domination of humanity over creation was allegorized into an explanation of temporal rule. In contrast to the kingship existing into eternity that the Norman Anonymous presented,
their early Gloss on the Pauline Epistles incorporated a startling denial of the permanence beyond the end of history of any form of hierarchical authority. On 1 Corinthians 15:24, 'When He will abolish every principality, every power and every virtue,' the masters commented: 'As long as the world lasts, angels govern angels, demons govern demons, and human beings, human beings, to serve or deceive the living. But when all shall have been gathered, then all power (prelatio) shall cease, for it will no longer be necessary.'[33]

---------------------

[32] Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D., pp. 128-9, Libelli de Lite, Vol.3, p. 663.
[33] P. Buc, 'Principes gentium dominantur eorum: Princely Power between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Twelfth-Century Exegesis', in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T.N. Bisson (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 310-28, p. 316.

The argument isn't exactly the same: Milbank (sounding very Protestant, ironically) wants to mark a discrete end in Christ's priestly work with His death, whereas the Anonymous sees Christ the priest as continuing to eternity. But the idea in both cases is that one way or another, kingship goes beyond priesthood as a christological office, and so it should be privileged in political thought as well.

Milbank is often identified as "medieval" in his thought. Sometimes this is proclaimed as a good thing, and sometimes it's meant to be derogatory. In either case, though, it always seems like an incredibly vague identification. Here, perhaps, is a suggestive possibility for whom Milbank might actually have in mind when he follows certain lines of argument. The connection is further recommended by the prominent place of the Anonymous in later Anglican thought of an Erastian bent. More importantly, the quote from Buc brings to the fore other exegetical possibilities from a historical period that is usually just assumed to be cornered by certain of today's nostalgic modes.

Charity and Disagreement

2011-01-05T15:01:00.001-06:00

A common misconception takes interpretative charity to be an inability to say anything contrary about someone's thoughts or actions... a sort of well-meaning but naive refusal to engage in argument because a nicer and more well-meaning interlocutor could always be plausibly imagined. The idea is that the overly-charitable interpreter nuances a person's position to death so that even the worst crimes and falsehoods could be justified in the name of standing aloof from uncivil polemic.

On the contrary, nothing about interpretative charity prevents strong disagreement, despite any conventional wisdom otherwise from the blogosphere. The basic idea of interpretative charity is this: I interpret a thinker under the assumption that they have every intention of being coherent and reasonable in what they say, and that as a result of this intention there's probably a good bit of coherence and reasonableness that can actually be granted to them before simply dismissing their thought as so much nonsense. In a very mundane sort of way, we all depend upon charity to get along with everyday communication. We fill in gaps and make implicit distinctions explicit whenever we talk with someone, simply because we're charitable enough to assume that they have basic communicative abilities and intend these sorts of things in the first place. Interpretative charity simply assumes the same about higher levels of discourse... that if a thought is compelling or meaningful for someone else, there's probably some level of coherence and reasonableness that would at least make it reproducible and recognizable in my own thinking (if not always equally compelling).

Alain Badiou articulates something like this in The Century, taking matters straight to the classic test case of Nazism:

"Allow me to raise what nowadays is a provocative, or even forbidden, question: What was the thought of the Nazis? What did the Nazis think? There is a way of always leading everything back to what the Nazis did (they undertook the extermination of the European Jews in gas chambers) that completely precludes any access to what they thought, or imagined they were thinking, in doing what they did. But refusing to think through what the Nazis themselves thought also prevents us from thinking through what they did, and consequently forbids the formulation of any real politics that would prohibit the return of their actions. As long as Nazi thinking is not itself thought through it will continue to dwell among us, unthought and therefore indestructible." (3-4)

[side note: an interesting flip-side to the Nazi example is Badiou's caution against anti-political moralizing conclusions on p. 53, following his discussion of political violence]

Something like that strikes me as similar to what is meant by a charitable stance... simply a prior assumption of thinkability (and one might add in most cases, of significant coherence and reasonableness)... but it certainly doesn't prevent harsh critique. Quite the opposite, any harsh critique only really hits its mark to the extent that charity has carried the preparatory interpretation as far as it will go.

While I don't see any need to link other conversations, this post originated out of continued frustration with the idea, held by a few folks, that I can be something of an etiquette obsessed contributor to theological conversations on blogs, unwilling to ever just go out and offer a straightforward criticism. This may be the case... for the most part I don't see the draw of spending one's time arguing with others over a screen... but any such avoidance of criticism shouldn't be associated with interpretative charity. The two are quite different practices. Conflating them will just lead to making charity less appealing to theologians and theology an even more useless exercise than it has already become in some cases.

For an example of one of my own attempts at interpretive charity done for primarily critical purposes, I'd recommend reading my 2009 article, "'Fullness of the Spirit' and 'Fullness of Catholicity' in Ecclesial Communion", in IJST. The argument I make against the CDF and the sitting pope simply couldn't have been made without taking most of the paper to follow through certain arguments on the basis of their own most reasonable terms. That is, without prioritizing interpretative charity some critiques actually remain unavailable.

A few items/holiday happenings...

2010-12-28T10:12:00.001-06:00

I have not had much to contribute here during Christmas vacation, and have been spending most of my time with family. As far as research goes, I'm working on a book review of James Blythe's The Worldview and Thought of Tolomeo Fiadoni and in the process of writing a book chapter, again on Anglican/ecumenical issues. I'm reading Alain Badiou's The Century for the first session of a course on Carl Schmitt that will be led by Eric Santner this winter quarter, and The Fellowship of the Ring for pleasure. Most other reading has been articles/church documents for the book chapter.

I did make good on my previous post about independent bookstores, and visited Politics & Prose to get Christmas gifts for my brother and father (I visited Hole in the Wall Books but had no luck finding what I needed. An accompanying two-year old sans nap also made browsing difficult). I'll be heading to Second Story Books tomorrow, and would like to try to get to Capital Hill Books before we return to Chicago. A final store worth noting for those in the D.C. area, One More Page should be opening any day now. I ran across the new store by chance, and then found out that a family friend will be in charge of their acquisitions. Best of luck for this new venture during a tough climate for booksellers.

The latest issue of Ecclesiastical Law Journal is out. I've been able to read the articles by Sagovsky and Leahy, both originally presentations from the Eleventh Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers held this past April. I'd recommend both strongly as overviews of the relevance of law for current ecumenical matters. The content seems to be freely accessible for the moment, so download it while you can.

Contents for the latest and forthcoming issues of Theological Studies have been posted. I haven't gotten to look at either one.

The Anti-Moderate on libraries.

Two questions: 1) Tricia and I recently got an ipod (hello, 21st century!) and I've been toying around with it. Is anyone aware of a good app for scanning books/documents? I've tried some free ones but they don't make very clear images. 2) Does anyone know where a full transcript of speeches from the PCPCU's 50th anniversary might be available? I'm especially interested in Kurt Koch's address (Rowan Williams' address can be found here).

Every time you buy a book from an indie bookseller...

2010-12-16T15:01:00.001-06:00

...an angel gets his wings.

For the holidays, when lots of books are being bought and given, I thought I'd write another post about resisting the temptation of buying from Amazon.com (see previous discussions here and here).

The funny thing is that as much as academics tend to be more conscious of systemic problems related to the environment, global capitalism, discriminatory practices, etc., most of us don't seem to think of Amazon.com as equivalent to Walmart or speak out against its abusive practices. Quite the opposite, we probably patronize Amazon more than anyone (I recall some introductory remarks at a lecture by Robert Pippin where he said that his young son described the job of a philosopher as, "sitting on the computer and ordering books from Amazon"). There's a sense, I think, that so long as we're in a veritable arms race to grow our libraries and books cost so much to begin with, we need to get our texts as cheaply as possible. This creates a blind spot that prevents us from seeing what such practices do to the very book industry upon which our work depends. In the one area where we really know our stuff... published texts... we fail to make a difference, even as we speak out about ethical and sustainable social practices in other areas further removed from our academic life.

The arguments against Amazon have been repeated enough, and I won't get into them here. You can look at the article, "The Trouble with Amazon" that I linked in a previous post. A more recent article worth reading has been written by Onnesha Roychoudhuri for the Boston Review, "Books After Amazon". Over time you should also check in to the new blog Against Amazon run by Jeff Waxman (of Hyde Park's own Seminary Co-op Bookstore and 57th St. Books). As the subtitle describes, Against Amazon is "an online archive to educate consumers about the problems and politics of doing business with the beast."

While it would have been easier to avoid the temptation of Amazon during the holiday season if the hackers standing up for Wikileaks were successful in crashing its site, you can still choose to go elsewhere. If you still need to buy a gift for someone, look up a local independent bookstore (I added a link to IndieBound over on the right sidebar a few weeks ago) and get something there. As a New Year's resolution, readers of this blog who are themselves bloggers can start to do what I've always done here when linking books that I talk about... always link to the publisher rather than the Amazon.com page. Write blog posts about local booksellers in order to share their existence with more people. Buy at least a few of next semester's coursebooks from a local independent store (or order them online through an independent store if you don't have any locally). Buy from publisher websites rather than Amazon.com if the book you need isn't available in the limited stock of a local store and can't be ordered by them.

Melchizedek article published...

2010-12-10T15:27:00.002-06:00

My most recent article, "Melchizedek as Exemplar for Kingship in Twelfth-Century Political Thought", is now published in the latest issue of History of Political Thought. Following is the abstract:

This article examines the use of Melchizedek as an exemplar for kingship in the twelfth century, considering interpretations offered in the Norman Anonymous, Bernard of Clairvaux’s de Consideratione and John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. While the Norman Anonymous provides a Christological and royalist reading of Melchizedek’s roles as king and priest, de Consideratione offers a more nuanced explanation of papal power without significant regard for disputes of secular and ecclesiastical liberties. The Policraticus, on the other hand, advances a theory of divinely elected, non-hereditary kingship on the basis of Melchizedek’s being ‘without genealogy’. The interpretation of the Policraticus stands in tension with a prominent rabbinic teaching that Melchizedek is identical to Shem, the son of Noah, and so possessive of a lineage that raises interesting (though not insurmountable) challenges for the non-hereditary kingship theory advanced in the Policraticus.

~~Please email me if I can help you by sending a PDF of the article.~~

UPDATE: [As far as I recall, Imprint Academic has not sent me any copyright agreement to sign for this paper. I've decided to post the article on my academia.edu page so that it's publicly accessible unless I hear instructions otherwise from the publisher because of copyright restrictions of which I haven't yet been made aware.

Imprint Academic is a nice small publisher that has a strong focus on real print-and-paper literature, so I hesitate to short-circuit their good work via open access of this sort. Part of the reason why I'm doing this is also because the website doesn't yet seem to have subscription-based access available even for universities that subscribe to HPT- or at least it has been intermittent. If you'd like to support Imprint Academic, check whether your university library subscribes to HPT or another of their titles, and ask them to add the title if it's absent.]

Also published in this issue is an article by Vasileios Syros, "Linguistic Contextualism and Medieval Political Thought: Quentin Skinner on Marsilius of Padua". I wrote my Melchizedek article for a seminar with Prof. Syros in 2009, and at the time Prof. Syros was working on this article. I had the opportunity to read a draft and offer some thoughts on it, and he's kindly acknowledged me in the published version.

Marion lecture on Christian Philosophy

2010-11-29T00:08:00.001-06:00

I mentioned Jean-Luc Marion's lecture "Is there a Christian Philosophy?" a few weeks ago, and it was suggested that I discuss the talk here at clavi non defixi. Apparently the lecture is now online, so now you can see it for yourself and I don't have to worry about pulling together some sort of debriefing from my complete lack of note-taking that evening. (and thanks to Kyle for posting this)

"Is There a Christian Philosophy?" from The Lumen Christi Institute on Vimeo.

And then there were two...

2010-11-19T21:43:00.005-06:00

Our second child, Becket Gilead Kuehn, was born this morning. I'm home with our daughter Sophia and about to get some rest. The blog may rest a bit as well over the next few weeks (although I suppose it's been slowing for a while now) as the semester ends and as we take Becket home.

James Matthew Wilson on academic freedom

2010-11-17T08:30:00.001-06:00

Jack Stripling has a short article in IHE discussing the ongoing work of applying Ex corde Ecclesiae, and James Matthew Wilson of Villanova University has offered the following response in the comment section:

To speak of "balancing" adherence to Catholic teaching and the privilege of academic freedom at once conceals and decides in advance the central question Catholic universities face.

It conceals it, because the competition is not between freedom and faithfulness but between the freedom to seek the True and mere absence of purpose. Catholic universities are committed to the contemplation of the Truth, the human capacity for which is the source and purpose of freedom; the modern conception of academic freedom assumes "freedom" to mean the simple absence of a specific end to human inquiry. It is a kind of functional nihilism that reduces the intellectual life to a procedure.

But, of course, this specious terminology of "balance" also decides the question in advance. Most of your readers, and most academics, will think of "freedom" in terms of procedural liberalism -- in terms, that is, of the mere absence of coercion. Any commitment will automatically be deemed a species of coercion and, in that light, any effort to "balance" freedom with faithfulness will be judged a violation of freedom.

Catholic universities continue to grapple not with how to balance two competing goods, but whether to remain real universities or to settle in with the rest of academe as listless buffets for those who believe that power alone informs the human condition and that the pursuit of truth is just one more oppressive ideology.

As I have said following R.R. Reno's rankings, I don't think that accusations of academia as "listless buffets" or "functional nihilism" are always accurate. A unified and worthwhile academic vocation can be well nurtured in a non-confessional environment as well as it can in a university adhering closely to the norms of the churches (and I don't see Wilson denying this). This fact, however, should not mislead one to think that "faithfulness" and "freedom" in an academic context are thus opposed, and Wilson rightly points out a false dichotomy that I would venture to say is even more prevalent than the sort of false dichotomy that Reno's sectarianism represents.

This doesn't mean that one can't raise objections about the administration of religious institutions- that doing so would be to falsely pit "freedom" against "faithfulness". Just as certain false conceptions of freedom enjoy some currency in academia, so do some false conceptions of faith, and it is appropriate to raise critical objections to ecclesiastical control when doing so is appropriate for the academic task within the context of faith. I've raised such objections during my time at Wheaton College, and doing so never represented a call for "functional nihilism" opposed to the institution's evangelical roots. Andrew Chignell's essay "Whither Wheaton?" is another more prominent example of such faithful critique.

My sense is that strong dichotomies between free inquiry and dogma are perpetuated more by simple laziness than by any sort of militant secularism. It is easy enough to remain empirical and realize that provocative and creative academic work is done in a confessional context just as well as in a non-confessional context. This should be proof enough of its legitimacy, as far as I'm concerned; otherwise we venture into the territory of ideology. What is less empirically justifiable is... not just the superior academic results... but even the mere existence of this ideal-type of a completely unencumbered situation of free inquiry. I just don't see how such a thing could exist on an institutional level, much less function properly. There will always be orthodoxies, religious or not, and that's not a bad thing. Unalloyed freedom simply isn't something that communities of inquiry do.

Jared Wicks on communio and ecumenism

2010-11-09T14:26:00.003-06:00

I just bought an old copy of Ludwig Hertling's Communio: Church and Papacy in Early Christianity at O'Gara & Wilson and was reading through the introduction by Jared Wicks on my way to campus. His thoughts (and this is 1972... certainly a lot of ecumenical import has transpired since then) were worth quoting, I thought, and support a lot of what I was trying to get at in my "'Fullness of the Spirit' and 'Fullness of Catholicity' in Ecclesial Communion."

To begin, it's noteworthy that Wicks references the Anglican Communion as a "church" in the introduction rather than simply an "ecclesial community" (p. 6). He goes on to say of the ecumenical task:

The great gain afforded by the ecclesiology of communio becomes apparent when we ask what is the goal of Christian ecumenical efforts. Ecumenists are not striving for the eventual transfer of masses of Christians to some system of doctrine, worship, and church polity other than their own. The goal, rather, is the extension of bonds of communio between these churches now existing as separated communities of faith and worship.

[...] The commitment to ecumenism means striving toward the day on which churches can turn toward each other and in the light of faith perform a mutual and corporate act of ecclesial recognition. This is the Christian unity we seek: churches acknowledging each other as valid articulations of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. Then the bond of communio can be extended between the bodies which have recognized in each other a total complex of genuinely Christian belief, worship, and polity. With full communio established, no further assimilation or organizational merger need be sought. (p. 6-7)

I think it's also worth noting the way that Wicks discusses "belief/doctrine, worship, and polity" here. On the one hand, he says in the first quoted paragraph that there does not need to be any shift to a new form of doctrine, worship, or polity for the churches. On the other, he says in the second quoted paragraph that ecclesial recognition involves an assessment of belief, worship, and polity as "genuinely Christian".

I've found this to be the difficult balance in ecumenical considerations. To turn back to my own work, my 2008 article on the Church of Nigeria and the Anglican Communion offers a much more restrictive and exclusivist approach to church unity... lines in the sand are drawn and certain beliefs/worship/polity are recognized as unacceptable. This presents clear difficulties for an ecclesial situation where one's fellowship with Christ through baptism and eucharist would supposedly be adequate for unity. On the other hand, my 2009 article on Protestant and Roman Catholic relations went quite far in an inclusivist direction... the work of the Spirit is adequate to establish unity, and to cite reasons of polity against recognition of the Protestant churches as veritable churches is to inappropriately pit one work of the Spirit against another. In this case, though, how does one decide where to draw the line determining belief, worship, and polity as "genuinely Christian"? And in the case of my 2008 article on the Anglican Communion, when does drawing a line become the sort of insistence on a "transfer of masses of Christians to some system of doctrine, worship, and polity other than their own" that Wicks denies as the goal of ecumenism?

Clearly both tasks are needed, so a judgment of legitimacy in one case and a recognition of what Walter Kasper calls "pluriformity" in another case doesn't need to be hypocritical or contradictory. But disagreement over discernment between the two in any particular situation is, I take it, the main source of disputes in ecumenical dialogue.

A few items, from journals...

2010-11-09T08:00:00.000-06:00

I had some time to browse through the current periodicals section yesterday afternoon, something that I haven't really done since leaving Buswell Library this past summer. The University of Chicago's collections were obviously a good bit more extensive than Wheaton's, so I had the added bonus of finding some periodical literature with which I was not previously familiar. Following are a few highlights. I've only included stuff from continental Europe, under the assumption that this would be of greater assistance to readers.

Todd Statham of McGill University has an article in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 121.1, '"Landlouping Students of Divinity": Scottish Presbyterians in German Theology Faculties, c. 1840 to 1914'. The article argues against stereotypes of liberal 19th century German theology and discusses evangelical Presbyterians who attended German faculties because of conservative or evangelical reputations there.

In Mitteilungen des Institutes für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 118.3-4, Werner Maleczek has an article on "Franziskus von Assisi, Papst Innocenz III. und die römische Kurie im Jahr 1209."

In Wissenschaft und Weisheit 73.1, Sophie Delmas and Lydwine Scordia provide a brief review of an international conference on Nicholas of Lyra, which was originally published in French in Etudes Franciscaines.

The spring issue of Revue Thomiste is devoted to "L'Herméneutique de Vatican II".

Fellows in Residence Program at St. Paul's Parish

2010-11-08T09:39:00.000-06:00

Nathan Humphrey (who blogs at Covenant and Communion in Conflict) has passed along information to me about the Fellows-in-Residence Program at St. Paul's Parish in Washington DC. Anglicans in the anglo-catholic tradition or those interested in anglo-catholic formation should look into this opportunity.

As far as I can tell, Anglicans from continuing churches, AMiA, CANA, ACNA, etc. would not be allowed to take part in this program, so a good deal of Anglican readers of this blog may not qualify. But do read the FAQ on this to see if yours is an exceptional case of some sort.

The Fellows-in-Residence program provides a unique opportunity for clergy and laity to live and work temporarily as part of the St. Paul’s community. The Fellows program has two goals: sharing St. Paul’s rich liturgical, musical, human, and pastoral resources with clergy and lay colleagues, and receiving their gifts in return.

A few items...

2010-11-04T11:37:00.000-05:00

In honor of Reformation Day, Adam Myers (of the Wheaton College Archives, Buswell Library, and the MA program in Church History) has posted three plenary addresses on Luther given by Heiko Oberman at Wheaton College in 1983.

Issue 17.1 of the Journal for the History of Modern Theology is out, and has an unusually long list of articles that all look quite interesting (I suppose when you wait until September to publish Issue #1, the article list does probably pile up). Shawn Colberg of Notre Dame has an article on Cajetan, Simon Gerber on Schleiermacher, Paul Rasor on Channing, and CJT Talar on Loisy. Finally, Paul Dafydd Jones and Bryan L. Wagoner each have articles on Barth.

Two papers worth attending next week for those in the Chicago area. On Tuesday the 9th, Christine Helmer of Northwestern will be speaking on "Postliberal Luther and the Liberal Schleiermacher" at the University of Chicago Theology Workshop. Mary Emily Duba will respond. On Wednesday the 10th, Jean-Luc Marion will speak for the Lumen Christi Institute on "Is There A Christian Philosophy?"

Andy Goodliff mentions Robert Jenson's new book on Canon and Creed.

The David Brown Book Co. has a sale going for Biblical Studies titles following SBL.

The picture below was taken by microbiologist Justin Kern, AB'04, PhD'10, and is part of UChicago: Strange Reflections. Thanks to Kyle for pointing this out. Consider this an extension of my last post, and further (more aesthetic) arguments for studying theology at Chicago.

Reno, grad programs, and Chicago (again).

2010-10-28T23:45:00.005-05:00

Earlier this year I had gotten in touch with some other theology bloggers to discuss the possibility of writing a series of posts about graduate programs in theology (and related fields) from a number of different perspectives. Following the aftermath of R.R. Reno's 2009 ranking of theology programs, it struck me as important to have some extensive open discussion about these matters. Because the programs themselves can be rather opaque, decisions of upcoming graduate students can often be made as a result of rumor, prejudice, and second-hand accounts. While a handful of blog posts could conceivably just add to this cacophony, an open discussion with disagreeing voices or voices from students actually attending these various schools would at least provide the opportunity to avoid one-sided assumptions.

Over the summer and into the fall, plans for such a blog series have fizzled, no doubt because we're all busy doing our thing. In the meantime, Jamie Smith has put up a "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Most recently, though, R.R. Reno has written a new ranking article called "Schools of Thought", and Kevin Davis has provided some more thoughts at After Existentialism, Light. I've already responded in the comment section of Davis's post, but I thought it would be good to write at greater length here. This is a bit less prepared a statement than I had intended last spring, and probably a bit late for those applying for the 2011-2012 year. In any case.

Reno follows a somewhat different line of argument this year, though much of what he says is the same as his previous two rankings. While I'm not sure whether he read my response to him last year, it seems that he's followed a bit of my advice-- a number of schools I suggested as being worthy of rank have been added, a wider (though not much wider) list of professors than the handful of names we all already know is mentioned, etc. Duke and Notre Dame sit tied at #1, Princeton Theological Seminary is at #3, Wycliffe College is #4, CUA is #5 and Marquette is #6. The University of Chicago doesn't make the list (I'll get back to that).

Reno's underlying point in this article is to emphasize the importance of a defined intellectual culture in a graduate program:

A good graduate program in theology doesn’t just have high academic standards and a commitment to students. It needs to stand for something—neo-Thomism, or Barthianism, or postliberalism, or neoorthodoxy, or some other angle of vision. The labels never fully capture the complex interplay of faculty interests, but they do suggest a theological culture—a corporate personality capacious enough to allow for interesting arguments yet defined enough to give the arguments weight and focus.

The programs that do not fare so well with Reno are those which he deems inadequate on the basis of this standard:

Too often, students, faculty, and administrators—in their different ways—underestimate the importance of corporate personality. Not long ago, Harvard Divinity School stood for something. So did Claremont, Yale, the University of Chicago, and Union Theological Seminary. They were alive with the urgency of the mainline Protestant project, which reflected the needs of a living community of believers negotiating the relations between modern identity and the traditional demands of faith.

The dramatic decline of the once dominant Protestant establishment has set these programs adrift. With little sense of purpose, they tend to divvy up faculty appointments: some historical specialists, a feminist, a liberationist, somebody doing world religions, perhaps a Jewish scholar or a Muslim—even a faculty member or two who represent a moderately traditional outlook. The whole is far less than the sum of the parts.

Kevin Davis's post concurs on the importance of such a corporate identity, and I have a sense that such values are relatively popular in theological circles today (or for that matter, in partisan political circles). I hesitate, though, to grant him this sort of academic standard. Without question, it's important for a student of theology to attend a program where their research and priorities will meet with a sympathetic audience of some sort; if no professor has any interest in the prospective student's work or if there isn't any broad basis for conversation to even begin, then such a program isn't an ideal place to study. But I think the assumption that "schools of thought" should be foundational to the identity and work of a theology department is pretty baseless, and perhaps even dangerous.

Most really living "schools of thought" that we can identify institutionally were or are a result of happy professorial constellations that produced a lasting effect on the world of scholarship. Usually the strongly institutional identification faded in a few generations as students of these professors dispersed and took the "school" elsewhere, or as professors retired. This doesn't mean that, say, Yale presently stands in a demeaned position because we are no longer in the 1980's. Quite the contrary, an institutional school of thought seems to be the exception of higher learning rather than the rule. It is a good thing insofar as it reinvigorates thought with a coherent perspective pushed by a unique group of professors, or an editorial board, or an ecclesial movement. But I don't see any reason to take it as the ideal form of university learning.

In this sense it's baseless to assume that one must seek out a "school of thought" in an academic institution. But the standard can become outright dangerous for up-and-coming academics, I think, insofar as it fosters a sectarian outlook amongst dogmatic theologians. There is a striking lack of catholicity in Reno's thoughts, that is. Why, in an institutional setting devoted to critical exchange with the goal of knowledge and understanding, would we want to insist that agreement be engineered from the beginning? This strikes me as a rather unorthodox account of the university's vocation, which I take it has always had relatively universal (again, read catholic) aims, whether in its religious or secular versions.

Reno does not simply encourage enclaves for their own sake, of course. His goals are praiseworthy: "a corporate personality capacious enough to allow for interesting arguments yet defined enough to give the arguments weight and focus." I'm not sure that arguments need to be "interesting" so much as "worthwhile", but his point is well taken. He and I would both advocate for academic inquiry free enough to critically engage in the dogmatic task. It is my burden then, I suppose, to reassure would-be graduates that a non-sectarian theological faculty can adequately grant arguments "weight and focus". As each school will be different and I don't have the experience that Reno does, I can really only speak to this with regard to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

According to Reno, the Divinity School and others like it were "once alive with the urgency of the mainline Protestant project", although now they are "adrift" and have "little sense of purpose." He goes on to speak of commitment to diverse faculty specializations as merely "divvy[ing] up faculty appointments."

Kevin Davis over at After Existentialism, Light writes similarly of the University of Chicago Divinity School, "Chicago, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as lacking this shared identity, except for some vague value in achieving a rigorous standard of scientific excellence." What is unclear to me is why a value of rigor and excellence in academic study is "vague," or why an institution that pursues such a value could be perceived as lacking an "identity" or a "spirit" or a "mission". At what point did "schools of thought" come to resonate so strongly with the theological community that possessing one became a necessary component of university learning? It's not schools of thought themselves that I have a problem with, or even theological departments being dominating by particular schools of thought... I can see quite well what Reno and others value in such arrangements, and I agree that where they happen to occur one should certainly take advantage of the confluence. But this is not how universities are meant to function.

Here is an example of how I think universities are meant to function.

At the University of Chicago Divinity School, every master's level student starts their program with an introductory course to the study of religion. A text is chosen by the faculty to guide the class, and throughout the semester different professors from every area of study in the faculty give guest lectures, discussing the text from the perspective of their field. For the past few years, the text has been Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th century fable written by Ibn Tufayl about the philosophical development of a feral child as he grows into adulthood. This text becomes an opportunity for historical analysis, or comparison to other philosophical systems, or reflection upon the basis of theological knowledge of God. It is not something that the Divinity School upholds in a mission statement. It's just a text. And we pick it apart, consider its relevance, disagree about it, come to agreement about it.

Nor do we uphold any particular approach to any particular text as a part of our "mission". But this never seems to keep anyone from granting the necessary "weight and focus" to arguments that are made, as Reno fears. A student who entered the theology doctoral program with me this year is interested in working with a professor of Islamic studies for his research. A professor of Christian theology here is often in conversation with a professor Indian philosophy because of similarities in their work. I've taken classes outside of the Divinity School itself, in the history department and the Committee for Social Thought... and in both cases my research papers on historical theological matters have been well-received and discussed by professors who have rather little personal interest in theology.

I imagine that such breadth of interests and engagement does not characterize every university, and that it is occasionally absent within the University of Chicago as well. But if this sort of teaching and collaborating is happening in an environment of catholic sensibilities, why would one opt for the alternative of various more restrictive "schools"? What does it really gain for the loss that accompanies it?

Postscript on Marginalized Applicants

Tyler Wittman asked this in the comment section of After Existentialism, Light, and the issue is worth addressing:

I was speaking with one of the students, an evangelical, in the [The University of Chicago Divinity School] and he did say that evangelicals kind of had to come in through the back door. Any truth to that? He said basically if I didn’t want my application to be tossed in the garbage from the get-go, I needed to contact Hector first.

Once again, I’m not assuming this is Chicago in a nutshell, but that was the extent of my interaction back in May.

Not only is this question on a lot of people's minds (concerning Chicago and elsewhere), but I think these sorts of concerns go a long way in perpetuating the allure of "schools of thought"... I would also guess that it's a feedback loop of sorts whereby strong sensitivity to schools of thought returns to perpetuate fears of reaction against one for being of a particular "school of thought", which leads to a tighter grip on one's school, etc.

Of course I don't know what goes on in the admissions committees here at Chicago; I suppose they could be weeding out evangelicals. But it strikes me as highly unlikely, given how many evangelicals are around here. I did contact Prof. Hector before applying to both programs, but when I applied to the MA program I was simply asking his advice. I have no idea what role he played on any admissions committee. For the PhD program, I was approaching him as a potential adviser, so it only made sense to talk to him. I wasn't going through Hector as a way to get past any more general animosity against evangelicals, that is. I really don't think prospective students need to worry about this. That said, if any evangelicals are worried about bias, don't hesitate to talk about the program with Prof. Hector first if you feel safer with him. Faculty are here to work with students, and you're better off talking with them beforehand. While I wasn't personally worried about the evangelical dynamic, I did have plenty of questions and concerns when applying here, and I pursued Prof. Hector and others in order to address them. You should do the same.

My personal advice, however, would be to fight any urge to entertain these sorts of explanations for rejection. When you look at the odds of getting into any decent program as a graduate student or a new faculty member, they don't look good whether you're an evangelical, or a Roman Catholic, or a mainline liberal, or a godless unbeliever. For every instance of bias, there are ten more instances of luckless failures to make the cut. If applications are being "tossed in the garbage from the get-go," it's likely because basic qualifications haven't been met. At that stage I doubt the committee has taken enough interest in your application to even know whether you're an evangelical or not. And once you get past that stage to the point of deep consideration of your application, rest assured... we at the University of Chicago are apparently "adrift" and retain "little sense of purpose" from our glory days of mid-century liberalism. It stands to reason that we'd hardly recognize a "school of thought" if we saw one.

A few items...

2010-10-22T14:53:00.001-05:00

Qantara.de has some articles worth reading. Almut Sh. Bruckstein Coruh writes on the manufacturing of the concept of Jewish-Christian tradition, and in contrast discusses the importance of the Jewish-Islamic tradition. While I like to think that Jewish-Christian dialogue isn't so much a post-Shoah tradition as she argues, it is certainly important to acknowledge the wider Abrahamic tradition and not merely take the Jewish-Christian relationship as most basic (so far as philosophical and cultural issues are concerned, at least... there are of course reasons for Christian theologians to take the Church's relationship with Israel to be more basic than with Islam, but I take it that this isn't the "Jewish-Christian tradition" with which Bruckstein Coruh is concerned). There is also another article on Islamic studies in Germany. I've already mentioned some earlier discussions of these developments.

Adam Kotsko's Politics of Redemption is available in the U.S.

Also from T&T Clark in the near future, I just found out that the Ecumenical Ecclesiology volume in which I have a chapter will have a paperback edition published in March. It's still $45, which in my mind is somewhat excessive, but it beats the appalling $130 that the hardback has been going for. I may have to sell my complimentary hardcopy and buy a paperback so as to pocket the difference.

For those in the Chicago area, O'Gara & Wilson, Ltd. has a sale going until the 31st where everything is 25% off. O'Gara & Wilson is a longstanding used and antiquarian bookseller and worth your time if you are nearby. I was speaking with Doug Wilson a few weeks ago, and they are (like most independents) in "survival mode", as he put it. So go buy their books! They have a good religion section. The also have a mounted buffalo head and a resident monk that my daughter loves to go and see.

Duke receives high praise for its post-liberalism and post-liberationism.

Kevin Hector on postliberal hermeneutics

2010-10-21T10:19:00.003-05:00

The Expository Times started a yearlong series in October on trends and developments in contemporary theology, with an opening paper by Peter Hodgson on liberal theology. The November issue continued with an article by Perry Schmidt-Leukel on pluralist theologies. The latest issue of the journal has just come out, and includes an article by Kevin Hector on postliberal hermeneutics, particularly considering Frei and Hauerwas on scriptural interpretation. Following is the abstract.

This essay considers two “postliberal” approaches to biblical hermeneutics: that of Stanley Hauerwas and of Hans Frei. Both are committed to the integrity and particularity of the biblical narratives and so reject the assumption that these narratives should be fit into putatively general interpretive frameworks, but they disagree about the implications of this commitment. For Hauerwas, it entails that Scripture’s meaning is available only to those who have been transformed through churchly discipline, whereas for Frei, it entails that the meaning of the biblical narratives must be ‘directly accessible’—it entails, that is, that there must be no gap between the narratives and their meaning, between their meaning and their ‘plain sense,’ nor between the narratives and the ‘essence’ of the one they depict.

Prof. Hector offered an illustration in our Glaubenslehre seminar yesterday to explain an account of God's omnipresence whereby "the effects of His causal being-in-Himself are everywhere". The illustration involved a paper on hermeneutics as an effect of Prof. Hector's causal being-in-self that exhibited his presence in some sense. Was the hermeneutics paper to which he referred this one, perhaps? In any case, as you read about Frei and Hauerwas on biblical interpretation, you may want to be aware of the Hectorian presence in the published effects of his causal being-in-self.

More action on Rowan Williams' Pentecost Letter

2010-10-14T11:49:00.001-05:00

Kenneth Kearon, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion Office, has announced that the delegate from the Southern Cone to the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO) has been dismissed as a full member of the committee. This follows similar action against delegates from the United States this past summer.

A thought and a question.

First, as I said back in May when Williams' letter came out, I think that those Anglican churches working towards renewal in North America should be ready to embrace discipline for their actions that have disrupted the unity of the Communion. Acknowledging that we have made a sort of penultimate choice against the visible structures of unity for the sake of a more fundamental commitment to unity also means acknowledging that doing so will have temporary consequences. And really, this is all the more reason for the disparate North American splinter groups to move on with the task of the ACNA, and to achieve independence from the Southern Cone, Rwanda, Nigeria, etc. so that our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the Communion don't have to sit under ecclesiastical censure any longer than is necessary. Their ministry to us over the past number of years has been an enormous blessing, and we should seek as far as possible to not be a burden to their own relationship with the wider Communion.

Second, I have searched around and found notification of the U.S. delegates being dis-invited from membership, and now the Southern Cone. Am I missing anyone? I'm not as up on all of this as I should be. Has the Canadian delegation received similar notification? Has Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan been replaced, or will she be replaced? And what of Nigeria or Rwanda? Again, I may have missed this and it's simply old news.

The Virgin Mary Amongst the Democrats

2010-10-11T10:29:00.000-05:00

An interesting conversation over at Library Juice Press. I thought that I was in agreement with Litwin on his basic point, but as the comment section has moved forward I've become increasingly worried about what he's advocating. I still think I agree with his basic point, but he seems to be basing it on a relatively unhelpful foundation.

Theologians with democratic sympathies may be interested.

A few items...

2010-10-01T10:51:00.000-05:00

Mostly CFP's, new literature, etc.

An edited volume from the late Mary Dove offering texts from 1300-1500 advocating for an English translation of the Bible. Published by the University of Exeter Press and distributed through UChicago Press.

Also from UChicago Press is The Promise of Salvation, a translation of Martin Riesebrodt (with whom I'm taking a course on Max Weber this autumn) offering a unified theory of religion based upon the promises that religion offers its adherents. Such an approach, I gather, seeks to make sense of religion as a universal phenomenon without relying on some idea of a homo religiosus. Also note that Riesebrodt is retiring this academic year, and there will be a conference in his honor this coming January at the Divinity School, Comparing Religions: On Theory and Method.

Andrew notes an upcoming conference on Bonhoeffer at Notre Dame. Abstracts due December 1.

LIAS, mentioned earlier, is up and running on the Peeters journals site, with the first issue of 2010 available. No abstracts available at the moment, although Peeters usually gets them up sooner or later, so check back.

The Karl Barth Blog Conference, of course.

The 2011 Illinois Medieval Association is meeting at DePaul, and the theme this year is "Representing the Middle Ages". Proposals are due October 15th.

Michel Rene Barnes returns to Modern Theology, this time offering an article that takes on contemporary concerns about moral theology and Christianity's (lack of) concern with an account of the origin of evil.

As a reminder, the 2010 Colin Gunton Essay Prize submission is due a month from today. The theme is "the theology of prayer".

Spontaneity and Freedom

2010-09-29T10:43:00.002-05:00

The following crossed my mind a few days ago, but the latest xkcd (above) reminded me of it again.

The hubbub in the popular press this past month over Stephen Hawking's new book has surely generated more heat than light, although I imagine that there is some apologetic use in engaging with it insofar as Christians in the pews are confused or scandalized by certain scientific or theological theories with which they are not familiar or not equipped to engage. But for the most part, the discussion seems quite old and rehearsed.

One thing I was wondering, however (and I have not read Hawking's book... only an article or two about it). If Hawking's argument is for "spontaneous creation," isn't this relatively fertile ground for theological conversation? I'm thinking in particular of theological ontologies that place a strong priority on divine freedom in explanation of God's self-determination.

Many of the more theologically interesting responses to the Hawking soundbytes argued against his idea of "spontaneous creation", and did so basically by appeal to traditional metaphysical proofs that make God necessary for the explanation of the universe, etc. etc. That these represented the bulk of the theological defenses over the question of God's existence is telling, I think, and should naturally situate those theologians who have qualms with the traditional proofs on Hawking's side of this "debate" (or whatever) rather than with their fellow theologians. (For what it's worth, this is also probably why so many theologians didn't see any need to respond to the Hawking press releases at all... it was one more yawn of a headline for them insofar as they were already more or less on the same page).

This means, however, that such a theological discussion would not concern whether or not there is a God or what science can tell us about divine existence. The point of contact between Hawking and the theologians is structural, and while it's an interesting point of contact, it also presents some problems. Hawking's "law" is a good deal different than the theological correlate "God", and Hawking's "spontaneity" is a good deal different than the theological correlate "freedom" or "election". So there's a good bit to work out, and the point wouldn't (or shouldn't, at least) be to make Hawking into a certain sort of theologian or to translate theology into scientific idiom in order for it to sound relevant. The point, I think, would more constructively be to talk about necessity, law, freedom, etc. as theoretical concepts in themselves and only secondarily as applied to theology, physics, philosophy, etc. It seems that this particular conversation between theology and physics probably has a bit more potential than the rather mundane stuff that has so far circulated. I'm not the one to pursue such a conversation further, but others might feel that doing so is fruitful.

(and another point to add... for those theologians who have a problem with such understandings of divine self-determination and freedom, the option is always open to carry out the above conceptual analysis but conclude from it that these theologies of freedom are inadequate on the basis of their similarity to Hawking's physics, post-Scotus and post-Kantian bogeymen, or what have you. This at least would offer a more detailed and interesting genealogy than the responses that simply reassert a cosmological argument against Hawking and leave it at that.)

A few items...

2010-09-17T08:31:00.001-05:00

The latest issue of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal is out. Most noteworthy is Norman Doe's treatment of Anglicanorum Coetibus, which has been made available for free by the publisher. Norman Doe, for those who are not aware, is one of the most well-regarded Anglican canonists working today. When I was doing my canon law paper a few years back, it was Doe's work that I pursued as the standard of excellence as I was trying to navigate a new field.

Adam Kotsko has posted a version of his "Gift and Communio: The Holy Spirit in Augustine's De Trinitate", which is currently sitting in the long tunnel of Scottish Journal of Theology forthcoming articles. Adam also mentions some points about access to journal articles that should be heeded and discussed further. I'm never as comfortable about posting drafts publicly, but it's also worth noting that journals are usually fine with authors sharing the final article pdf's with "colleagues". This creates the nominal hurdle of needing to distribute pdf's individually, but I'd always encourage people to email article authors and ask for a copy from them. I'm always happy to send copies of articles that remain under a copyright barrier of some sort (those that don't have such a barrier are available publicly on this blog and on my academia.edu page). I have also heard of these copyright terms being negotiated with publishers, but I've never done something like this and don't know where in the editorial process you would request a change in the contract (or which journals are open to such changes and which are not). Any information from others on personal experiences with this would be appreciated.

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion has received a grant for an extended study of sharia. The project will focus specifically on marriage law in Nigeria and the United States, and will be led by M. Christian Green, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im, and John Witte, Jr.

The Anti-Moderate has some thoughts on writing for primary- and secondary- text purposes. This is worth reading and considering; I have my own thoughts and personally would enjoy offering a defense of writing specifically for secondary purposes, but I will be away for a few days and wouldn't want to start a conversation I can't follow up on. Perhaps I'll join the comment section next week, or mention something here. (Also, if you haven't already, note that the Anti-Moderate has a new url)

A conference worth putting on your calendar, and perhaps submitting a paper for, on metaphysics and the philosophy of science.

Library Love

2010-08-19T09:10:00.000-05:00

Two things to note.

First, Rory Litwin of Library Juice has offered some important thoughts on librarianship as a profession that often sells itself on the basis of skills that other professions simply do better. Litwin argues that libraries need to reestablish what makes them necessary and distinct as institutions, rather than simply chase after "new technological tools" as their justification (not that libraries will abandon these tools or use them any less, but an understanding of the library's purpose or "niche" should not revolve around them).

Second, Melody Layton McMahan, director of the Paul Bechtold Library at the Catholic Theological Union, has started a blog! Melody's Blog is described as "An eclectic blog on sustainable scholarship and libraries, book jaunts and research, and odd interests like vocation, children's lit, and ???", and her first post discusses what this will entail at greater length. Her focus on "sustainable scholarship" will be worth following, and can also be found in some of her published work at Theological Librarianship.

Her "book jaunts" should also be interesting, and I'll note that I've been toying around with a similar project myself. If it comes to anything, I'll be mentioning it here shortly.

I write this post on my second-to-last day of employment here at Buswell Library, and I'm glad I can end things here with some good thoughts of librarians I've followed a bit. As someone working at a library who isn't a librarian (I don't have a degree in library science, that is), I've never felt quite competent in commenting on library matters, although I feel strongly that scholars need to have a better understanding of library work and form stronger connections with these institutions. In this sense I hope I've acted and will continue to act as a bridge between these two corners of academia. Theologians and librarians in particular have had a long history together, and I think that if any academic discipline stands in a good place to advocate for and be a part of the strength of libraries in the future, ours does.

A few items...

2010-08-17T17:09:00.002-05:00

The latest issue of Theological Studies is out. Included is an article by Talar on the modernist controversy, two articles on Vatican II, and others.

My recent post criticizing Google Books on metadata must have made someone unhappy, because my link disappeared from their page after a few hours. Still up, however, is a link to Tim Carmody, who discusses some of the problems with Google and also mentions the critical piece on Ars Technica that has been making the rounds. I think the Ars Technica pieces says it well, and really gets to the heart of the problem at Google. It isn't so much a problem with bad metadata, but rather with Google's seeming desire to go it alone and act as if it's doing something new, or doing it in a more innovative way than generations that have come before:

"Google may not (or, rather, certainly will not) be able to solve this problem to the satisfaction of scholars who have spent their lives wrestling with these very issues in one corner or another of the humanities. But that's fine, because no one outside of Google really expects them to. The best the search giant can do is acknowledge and embrace the fact that it's now the newest, most junior member of an ancient and august guild of humanists, and let its new colleagues participate in the process of fixing and maintaining its metadata archive"

Brian Reed makes some good points about problems of hyper-specialization in the academy, and how it creates unhelpful barriers for non-specialists interested in the literature outside of their own discipline. This happened to come up twice yesterday when I was speaking with different friends, in one case while discussing analytic philosophy of mind and in the other while discussing editorial work on academic literature more generally.

"How do you know what's fantastic humanities scholarship these days? Scholarly journals typically have specialists review books in their own fields, a habit which, no surprise, usually results in pieces that speak primarily to other insiders.Venues such as the TLS and the NY Review of Books and Bookforum can be more useful for the would-be interdisciplinary interloper, but they discuss only a teensy fraction of the academic books published. They concentrate almost exclusively, too, on new and recent publications, which limits their ability to make sound judgments about a work's lasting value. And they have a depressing tendency to confuse a non-specialist audience with an anti-intellectual one."

The Anti-Moderate on the intellectual imagination.

Others may be familiar with it already, but I ran across Prickly Paradigm Press for the first time a few weeks ago. Prickly Paradigm is a continuation of Prickly Pear Press, a British venture where pamphlet length works were published that made a critical contribution to academic disciplines, mostly in the social sciences. Prickly Pear is run by Marshall Sahlins and distributed through the University of Chicago Press. As you can see from the website, their title list is a bit outdated. I emailed their editor the other week, though, and he assures me that a new site is in the works, and that newer titles are available or forthcoming. Included is Roy Harris, The Great Debate About Art; Ira Bashkow, An Anthropological Theory of the Corporation; and Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology. I haven't read any of their work, but it looks like an interesting small press to check into... many of the earlier published titles are now available free in pdf through the publisher.

Metadata as body count.

2010-08-12T17:36:00.001-05:00

Apparently, big numbers do for Google techs what shiny objects do for birds and small mammals.

Shawn Goodwin (friend and guest blogger) brought a post by a Google employee to my attention the other day, where some of the metadata considerations involved in Google Books were discussed and a rough estimate of the sum total of the world's books was offered. The impetus? Leonid Taycher of Google says that people with nothing better to consider often ask him stupid questions like "Just how many books are out there?"

In order to answer such a question, Google has had to determine certain criteria for what constitutes a "book". They're not interested in creative "works" like a given novel or play, but rather, "tomes"... "an idealized bound volume" that can be distinguished as an artifact with any number of copies. ISBN numbers don't meet Google's standards for a tome count, though, because they are not used universally and have some quirks of implementation even where they are used. And don't get Taycher started on LCCN or OCLC identifications. What a mess of duplicate records and various local rules!

Okay, so all the stuff we've been doing is unhelpful. But since everyone is asking them stupid questions that couldn't have any possible relevance like "how many books are there in the world", Google needs to find a way to fix all of these idiosyncratic cataloging practices and incomplete records! Something must be done. So they come up with algorithms that boil down a ton of bibliographic records in order to make their own catalog. Yet another catalog. Because if variation amongst multiple catalogs bothers Google's totalizing instincts, it's obviously a sensible solution to add one more voice to the chorus.

All that so they can tell us that this week's best estimate for the sum total of the world's books is 129,864,880. I fail to see the point.

It's not that I have a problem with what Google is doing for books. I think that Anthony Grafton's talk at Google offers a sensible case for the symbiotic relationship between digital and print literature, and I'm entirely on board with the democratizing and preservationist possibilities offered by Google. Further, Google on the whole is approaching their project as a cooperative venture with libraries and even small bookstores. These are good things.

It is for these very reasons, however, that Taycher's remarks about metadata are that much more confusing to me. Sure Google has its strengths, but can anyone really say with a straight face that Google's metadata is anywhere near as reliable for a scholar as a small liberal arts college library, or a suburban public library? This is why alternative projects like Hathi Trust are so important. The problem seems to stem from an odd fixation on one big, totalizing body count of books. Taycher brings up the problem of multiple records for one edition of one book, but to what extent is this really a problem for the reader? Given that any catalog is going to only utilize one OCLC record, and that even in cooperative ILL efforts information like publisher, year, and author is what we're interested in rather than a nine digit string of numbers arbitrarily identifying a cataloger's description of this very publisher, year, author... I fail to see why the diversity and overlap of current library metadata is such a big problem. Surely the goal for catalogers should be to offer a relatively uniform account of different books that distinguishes them and associates them for the benefit of the patron. Given such goals, one distinct record for a book is preferable to ten distinct records that say the same thing. But Taycher gives the impression that these catalogs are inadequate simply because they aren't monolithic.

Such an attitude makes sense, of course, coming from Google. Because what they're trying to do isn't exactly to be a worldwide library. They aren't simply acquiring and taking stock of literature in an organized fashion. The digitized book in Google is a representation of the actual book on the shelf; it is a replica and to a certain extent its own distinct "tome" (to use their language). It is something like Magritte's picture of a pipe that is not a pipe. As Google makes these pictures of books/tomes that are not books/tomes, multiple descriptions (i.e. catalog records) of books that are able to converse with one another, compare notes, and yet continue to reference the same thing are simply a confusion. Google, after all, isn't interested in describing books. It is interested in scanning pictures of them for its database, and multiple witnesses (catalog records) only confuse this task by unintentionally suggesting to tone deaf Google technicians that there are more books in the world than there really are, or that these three renderings of this one book amount to saying that there are three separate books. Google isn't really interested in cataloging written works accurately. It wants to pile them up accurately in order to make pictures of them. Bibliographic description is therefore less relevant than a bare inventory.

Metadata as body count. Which is really a rather boring and unimaginative way to use metadata.

Islamic theology in German universities

2010-08-11T15:24:00.003-05:00

Qantara.de has two fascinating articles up today about the difficulties and possibilities present in the introduction of Islamic theology to German universities, following recent recommendations from the Wissenschaftsrat (I'm assuming this is the relevant report, although I haven't been following these developments and don't know for sure).

I will use the term "Islamic theology" here since I think the sense it makes to anglophone theologians outweighs the limitations of its distinctly Christian provenance, although the preferred term for the German universities is apparently "Islamische Studien". The interview with Peter Strohschneider gets into these nomenclature difficulties more extensively:

Islamic Studies as a theological subject are connected with a belief in Islam, while "Islamwissenschaften" are not. We suggested the term "Islamic Studies" even though it has some risks, for example the fact that in English it is equivalent to what we call in German "Islamwissenschaften", the subject we are trying to distinguish it from. We deliberately avoided using the word "theology" because it comes from the Christian tradition, but the problem is that the only terminology available in the German language has been shaped by Christianity or concepts with a traditional Christian background.

"Islamwissenschaften" are studies that are not bound up with a certain confession, similar to Literature Studies or History Studies. Islamic Studies in our sense by contrast is a confessional course of studies in the structural sense, just as Protestant Theology and Catholic Theology are.

Strohschneider also discusses the make-up of governing bodies charged with making decisions about the institutional future of Islamic theology, and the balance of religious institutional structures against state and academic interests. Here I think there are a good deal of parallels with problems that arise in Christian theological inquiry, where the relationship between theological work and ecclesiastical authorities on orthodoxy and pastoral matters are often ambiguous. Despite these ambiguities, Christian theology at least enjoys a long history of conventional practices within the secular academic setting, and so benefits from a basic familiarity with the problem if not its viable solutions.

The second article, "Lateral Thinkers Wanted" by Klaus von Stosch, touches on considerations that will be more relevant for those of us actively involved in theological inquiry already. Indeed, much of what he says sounds vaguely familiar, and while the distinctions he draws within Islam wouldn't exactly map on to distinctions within Christianity, one can easily imagine a similar sort of thing being done for Christian theological inquiry. Stosch speaks of "modernists" and "conservatives" within Islam, following the predictable characteristics of either category. The inevitable (though we still act as if it is a fresher option than previous dualisms) Third Way is then introduced,

So what we have left is the third group of Muslims, who on the one hand affirm our liberal democratic order and the secular organisation of our communities without reservations, but who at the same time bring with them a sensitivity for the dialectics of information and the social processes associated with those. Only this group can, through theological reflection, expose the emancipatory potential of Islamic thinking and establish a dialectical relationship between Islam and our society. Only this group succeeds, in fundamental solidarity with the values of the constitution, in revealing the liberating potential of the Koran for the victims of modernisation.

While I find the seemingly imperative hunt for such mediating panaceas a bit tiresome, I'm not intending to dismiss Stosch's point. These are all relevant concerns and useful responses to them. I'm not in a position to say how accurate a description of the Islamic situation this is, but certainly from my own religious vantage point the whole thing resonates and sounds plausible as an outline for the possibility of future Islamic theological inquiry in the German universities.

One contribution I would make to all of this reflection is to consider the relationship between theology on the one hand as a relatively speculative and philosophical discipline and on the other hand as tied much more to the canonical tradition of texts and laws for a given faith. Often I think that "theology" as we normally identify the inquiry is a creature of the secular situation... and I mean "the secular situation" as something going more than a dozen centuries back rather than simply during the last few modern centuries. The nature of theology as a detached rational inquiry not entirely concerned with the tradition of ecclesiastical texts (i.e., theology as non-exegetical inquiry) only seems to arise when discourse follows norms determined by certain philosophical possibilities, and when the purpose of inquiry is to pursue truth by these various open-ended discursive processes rather than by an examination and development of a statutory tradition of some sort.

The philosophical sort of theology is already quite at home within the secular academy- perhaps not always as a welcome presence, but at least as something that is recognizable and has played a role in the development of the arts and sciences with which it is included. Exegetical inquiry, on the other hand (and here I'm thinking things like midrash, fiqh, canon law, biblical exegesis, etc.) does not seem to have the same sort of relationship with academic inquiry. With the exception of Christian biblical exegesis (which through philology and textual criticism has made unique inroads into recent secular academic institutions), most of these exegetical disciplines are heavily institutionalized within their associated faiths and work independent of the secular academy.

Much of the difficulty presented in the articles over how to understand "Islamic theology" and how it should be represented seems to turn on this sort of internal division present in the Abrahamic theological sciences. There is of course a long tradition of Islamic theology engaging with Aristotle, Plato, and on these bases with Jewish and Christian thought. For this reason, I don't think that identifying an Islamic "theology" recognizable to the secular Western academic tradition needs to betray any sort of Islamic particularity. But this applies (as in Christianity and Judaism, probably) primarily to the philosophical sort of theology, and not to the text- and tradition-based inquiry that will have more trouble within secular institutional settings where Islam isn't quite so native (I make this distinction rather than simply speaking of secular institutional settings simpliciter because the same concern for native/foreign status is present in other faiths. For instance, Anglican ecclesiastical law is a more recognizable presence within British secular institutional contexts than in the U.S. simply because the Anglican presence is native to the development of secular learning there. One might argue the same for biblical studies as a sort of Protestant native to German, and through their influence to Anglophone, secular institutional contexts. Islamic "exegetical" theology isn't foreign to German secular inquiry because Islam is inherently non-secular, then, but rather because the German secular academic tradition has not been informed by the Islamic tradition to the extent that it has been by the Protestant tradition).

The point, then, is that the varying classes of assimilability that are so vexing for Stosch may be more a matter of differing tasks within theological inquiry and differing native secular soils within which those tasks are being planted. While the modern/conservative liberal/anti-liberal binaries are certainly identifiable and worth talking about, I'm not sure that they're quite so central to an explanation of the complexities facing Islamic theology in the universities... or for that matter, Christian theology in the universities.

A few items...

2010-08-10T13:32:00.001-05:00

Paul DeHart on Schleiermacher, Paul Molnar on Barth, and Daryl Ellis on Jüngel in the latest issue of Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie (52.1 out in July? Christoph Schwöbel's editorial discusses the new editorial team and shifts in the journal's focus, but doesn't mention why 2010 has gotten off to a slow start. Part of the NZSTh website lists their publication as triannual while elsewhere it is still listed as quarterly, so perhaps they are in the midst of a shift? Others surely know better than I do... please share.)

The Augustine Institute is publishing the Nova et Vetera book series, the first volume of which is a study by Aidan Nichols on Matthias Joseph Scheeben coming out this summer (the 2011 Nova et Vetera conference will also be devoted to Scheeben).

This news has been out for a few weeks, but the Seminary Co-op Bookstore will be moving across the street to the McGiffert House in light of the Milton Friedman Institute being set up. The new space sounds promising: "Cella said the increased space, coupled with increased investment in the Co-op, would allow the store to expand into areas that customers regularly ask about—a broader coverage of the sciences, for example, and more literature in languages other than English. He said the Co-op would be able to host on-site author signings and other events for the first time, and would be able to serve large crowds more comfortably at peak times, such as when students are buying books at the beginning of the quarter." Chicago Theological Seminary will be moving to a new building to be built and maintained by the University of Chicago.

Nijay Gupta notes that Hendrickson's academic titles are being acquired by Baker.

In Memoriam: Gerald F. Hawthorne

2010-08-04T15:37:00.001-05:00

We just received word on campus that professor emeritus of Greek, Gerald F. Hawthorne, has passed away. He had been in hospice care for the past month or so.

I'm not personally familiar with Hawthorne's scholarship, never having had a course with him and not being in biblical studies. Initially, I knew him during my time working as a student at the College cafe, where he would often come with his grandson and order ice cream. We would chat, but at the time I wasn't aware of his academic career. It was only when I attended the inaugural lecture of Karen Jobes for the Gerald F. Hawthorne Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis that I realized the guy standing with his wife to receive applause and bless the holder of his namesake chair was the same one who talked with me over ice cream at least once a week in the basement cafe next door. Since working on staff in the library I have continued to run into him regularly, as he had an office across the hall from where I work. Our interactions over these past few years have mostly involved brief "hello's" and my helping him with the copying machine, but for others he obviously had a deeper impact- you could always hear Dr. Hawthorne bellowing on the phone to someone or laughing in a similarly loud fashion with a visitor.

The blog of the Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections has revived one of their earlier posts on Hawthorne and a regular gathering he started with Art Rupprecht (under whom I did have a class) in commemoration of his death.

A few items...

2010-08-03T12:22:00.002-05:00

As of this past weekend, we are Hyde Park residents, although I'll continue to work at Buswell Library for another three weeks into August. Over the next month I imagine I'll be busy working and unpacking/setting up home, but there's enough in my bookmarks to put together an "A few items..." post. Some thoughts about the book v. the article in scholarly publishing and other matters related to the past few posts on book culture may make it into some posts over the next few weeks as well.

In Religion, State & Society 38.2, an article by Farrah Ahmed discusses weaknesses in certain fideist justifications for religious freedom, specifically engaging with recent work by Timothy Macklem- "The Value of Faith as a Justification for the Protection of Religious Freedom"

In Classical Philology 105.2, Peter Van Nuffelen has an article on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum diviniarum (which theologians will be aware of through Augustine's City of God), where he argues that "Varro's views on Roman religion and its history as expressed in ARD depend upon an originally Greek philosophical idea, possibly of Stoic origin, according to which religion contains primitive wisdom, that is, the truthful knowledge about the cosmos that earliest man possessed. This new hypothesis will allow us to probe beyond Varro's self-confessed pragmatic aim, and will correct the conclusion, drawn by those who study the ARD mainly in relation to its cultural environment, that Varro was interested in tradition for tradition's sake." (p. 163).

Matthew Alderman notes that his article on architecture and The Spirit of the Liturgy has been re-published for open access: "Heaven Made Manifest: an architectural solution for The Spirit of the Liturgy".

Dennis Johnson of Melville House has stopped by to comment on my previous post about "The Trouble With Amazon". He's offered some more specifics about publisher relationships with Amazon, and about the costs of bringing print and e-books to completion.

The other day I was told that I'm apparently the face of research here at Buswell Library. On the top left of the LibGuides research assistance pages that are now up, you can find me reading a book during a lunch break from a few years ago (I can assure you I wasn't so vain as to pose for this picture... a colleague was going around with a camera taking pictures for our website when I happened to be in the stacks). A number of research guides for biblical and theological studies are included on the site.

2011 theology conferences at Wheaton will include our annual theology conference, this year with the theme of "Global Theology in Evangelical Perspective", and a lecture by Kallistos Ware on the Orthodox-Evangelical dialogue (hosted by the Center for Early Christian Studies).

Tim Larsen on discrimination against Christians in academia

2010-07-30T11:31:00.002-05:00

I was delighted to find an article from Tim Larsen in IHE this morning... anything by him is always a good read, whether it's a review essay in Books & Culture, an article in a journal, or a witty email sent out to colleagues. His level-headedness and humor suites the touchy topic of religious discrimination perfectly. Larsen discusses particular cases of discrimination on the basis of religious reasons in a student's and his own research, and calls for a closer examination of the presence of such discrimination in the academy, of public perception of it, and of how the problem can be addressed.

Larsen's article comes on the heels of news that Kenneth Howell has been reinstated to teach Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois, and the unfolding of discrimination accusations at Oxford from a convert to Anglicanism. Apart from those deeply involved in the situation, I think we can set aside the discrimination case at Oxford for lack of information; at this point it seems impossible to tell from the perspective of the onlooker what exactly has happened. The case of Prof. Howell, however, has been raised as a matter of anti-Catholic discrimination, and so perhaps is more relevant to Larsen's article.

I'm skeptical, however. As I said on Wednesday, there's no reason to think that any crisis of anti-religiosity is demonstrated at UI. If anything, the only reason why Howell has successfully been reinstated is because of the huge influence that Christianity maintains in our universities. Other adjuncts have not fared so well. If an adjunct instructor were dismissed for offending students with a Judith Butler reading, for instance, I can't imagine they would have received such support or had such luck in being reinstated. The incident would have been another data point amongst many others and wouldn't have made any news.

Larsen is similarly cautious in his article. He's not out to claim that every supposed discrimination is actual, and he stays very close to his anecdotal evidence rather than making broad statements about the academy. The point upon which he refuses to budge, however, is that this sort of discrimination is present at times, and we shouldn't simply ignore it.

The comment section has abandoned all modesty, however, and tried to make this into a battle of epic proportions. Odd notions are circulating such as the idea that claims of discrimination are less impressive because they only come from "one brand of Christian". On the other hand, "liberal Christians never seem to talk about the discrimination they face, even when they incorporate aspects of their religious beliefs into their scholarly work." For the life of me, I don't see why this is relevant. Presumably not all traditions of Christianity are equally well assimilated to all cultures of academic or other discourse. It seems simply commonsensical to assume that certain denominations or political persuasions will sit more comfortably than others within the wider public. That liberal Christians are (supposedly) doing well seems no reason to ignore Evangelical claims that their own community is not doing so well. At most this seems to be a criticism of Larsen's use of the word "Christian" in the title rather than being more specific, but I don't see this as all that much of a criticism. And from the point of view of Christians themselves, I can't fathom the point of unnecessarily sub-dividing the Body when certain of our brothers or sisters feel unfairly treated.

There also seems to be a good deal of unhelpful comparison between religious groups and women, or ethnic groups, etc.-- and this comparative tit-for-tat is being employed by both sides. For some, discrimination against certain Christians just seems ridiculous in the face of more pervasive discrimination against minorities or those who are not a part of the ideological in-crowd. For others, discrimination against Christians is the last acceptable prejudice:

Imagine if *Inside Higher Ed* posted an article on anti-black discrimination in the academy, and the commenters all took issue with black students and their supposed malefactions. This would justly be seen as disgraceful. Somehow, however, in regard to Christian students, it's open season.

Again, Larsen's zealous supporters and vehement detractors miss his point. Does discrimination against religious reasons in the academy even need to be as shocking an injustice as racism or sexism for it to be acknowledged as a veritable problem? Who cares how "impressive" his argument is- if there are cases of discrimination surfacing, it's worth trying to address them with the end of creating a better and more plural community of inquiry. And on the other hand, what's the point of Christians in the comment section arguing "if this were a matter of racism, folks wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it"? Is there any point in competing with other injustices for the limelight? What does it accomplish to continually assert "You're blind to our plight, and you're playing favorites with other victims!" except to try everyone's patience and sound increasingly disingenuous in the face of other (usually more serious) instances of prejudice?

Larsen does make a comparison of sorts to other more recognized sources of discrimination, but I think he does so with a much different purpose:

Nevertheless, scholars ought to be concerned that Christians often report that the academy is a hostile environment. Are academics generally glad that such a perception exists? If not, how might it be dispelled? If it is based on genuine experiences, what can be done about a climate that tolerates religious discrimination? If the two stories presented here are merely assailable, anecdotal evidence, then why not gather information on this issue more systematically? Do academic institutions ever try to discover if their Christian students or scholars experience discrimination?

I am hereby calling for such an effort. This could be done through surveys, or focus group discussions, or even just by inviting people to tell their experiences and following up on them, seeing if certain patterns emerge. If these are not the best methods, just think of what you would do in response to reports that a university or academic society was marked by institutional racism or sexism and then apply those same strategies of listening, investigation, and response.

First, he makes clear that this is a matter of (relatively widespread) perception, but rightly argues that perceptions have reasons, and that it is worth investigating troubling perceptions that continue to carry weight with folks. He also re-asserts the fact that his two examples are merely anecdotal, but continues to point out that precisely because they are anecdotal, more helpful information should be obtained about levels of discrimination in the academy. This is all, for Larsen (and I think he is right), good enough reason in itself to address the problem of discrimination against Christians. There is no attempt to argue that "you should pay attention to us if you're paying attention to other victims of prejudice!". He only brings up the comparisons of sexism and racism as a suggestion for obtaining useful methods of information gathering: "If these are not the best methods, just think of what you would do in response to..."

Another point that has come up repeatedly in the comment section is that of statements of faith. While Larsen decries discrimination against Christians in academia, many point out that Wheaton itself, and other evangelical institutions, enforce dogmatic commitments of their own. This topic was picked up by Adam earlier this month, although he doesn't bring it up in his own comment on the Larsen piece.

I don't take dogmatic conformity within an institution to be problematic. It seems to me that such norms are always functioning in communities, and that some norms are more explicit, more demanding, or more restrictive than others. I don't see how this necessarily restricts free inquiry, however, unless one defines freedom in some flat sense of absence-of-all-constraint. There will always be frictions and difficulties when these sorts of norms are in place and compete with personal conscience, or wider sentiment, or shifts in corporate perspective over time... in that sense I'm perfectly willing to recognize the imperfections of these systems, and I've often disagreed with the way that norms are enforced here at Wheaton. I don't take this to be any sort of argument against the norms in themselves, though. It's simply confirmation of the fact that folks disagree about things.

One can't convincingly raise these concerns against Larsen's discrimination article, however, without coming to the unrealistic conclusion that secular institutions of academic inquiry are meant to be truly "free" in the sense of being normless. On the other hand, simply telling Larsen, "well, your own evangelical institution is dogmatic too!" doesn't answer anything, and worse, it undercuts any basis upon which one might justify non-discrimination in secular institutions of higher education. It's simply a destructive argument that we're all guilty of dogmatism, and doesn't really do anything to counter (in fact it makes it easier to confirm) Larsen's single, and rather modest, point: that discrimination against Christians is perceived and at least anecdotally confirmed within academia.

Some more on universities, humanities, publishing, etc.

2010-07-28T15:07:00.005-05:00

Related to recent discussions of Amazon as well as the non-renewal of Kenneth Howell's contract, I thought I'd mention a few items...

First, on Kenneth Howell. I was asked elsewhere whether I thought the non-renewal of his contract (after an email concerning Catholic teaching on homosexuality came to light) was an isolated incident, or reflected a wider trend in the academy. The answer to this depends very much upon one's perspective in asking. If the question is whether Howell's firing represents a more pervasive intolerance to Catholic thought or certain stances of sexual ethics, then no, I don't think this is the case. I doubt that even Howell's own situation involves such intolerance, much less acts as a representative of wider intolerance. On the other hand, I do think that Howell's non-renewal of contract probably reflects the plight of contingent faculty more generally. His story isn't at all unique-- indeed, I'm pretty confident that the only reason why it garnered so much attention and stirred up such opposition is because matters of religion were involved. Other adjuncts, fired for reasons that are less interesting to the otherwise uninterested public, are not nearly so lucky as Dr. Howell. Worth listening to on this are the thoughts of Cary Nelson from early 2008... Nelson is now the president of the AAUP, and is opposed to the action of UI despite also being quite opposed to Howell's doctrinal and ethical commitments. The problem here is not one of any particular views being disallowed from academia; rather, the problem is controversy more generally, and a university's unwillingness to defend the freedom of its faculty to research and teach without constantly worrying about being fired the moment someone raises a petition against them.

I ran across this through Jim West, and it's being re-posted all over the place today. Eva von Dassow of the University of Minnesota offers a critique of administrative spending practices to the Board of Regents:

Thanks to Tim H. for passing on this article about university presses and the future of publishing, which highlights some discussions from the conference of the other AAUP... the Association of American University Presses. Included is the usual fare of radical proposals and arguments for/against them, but I had a few random comments that I thought worth mentioning. The article highlights the amount of disuse present in some university libraries:

"Publishers also experienced shock and awe at a session on demand-driven library acquisitions. Michael Levine-Clark,collections librarian at the University of Denver, reported that 47% of books acquired from 2000 to 2009 were never checked out, a phenomenon echoed by Stephen Bosch, in charge of budgets and procurement at the University of Arizona library, where over the past decade $19 million has been spent on books that were never used.

research

Another point on the article. As much as I want to defend publishers, sometimes they are the problem. Tim Barton of Oxford UP is featured heavily in the article, but the prices that companies like his set for books are part of the reason why libraries can't afford to maintain their collections. Academic literature is always going to be more expensive than popular literature, but paperbacks over $40 and hardbacks over $100 begins to get rather excessive, and offer a difficult standard to ask our institutions to meet when they are charged with collecting hundreds of thousands of these books.

Ruth Franklin and Scott McLemee on Amazon

2010-07-28T10:20:00.001-05:00

Two more articles on Amazon out today... Ruth Franklin writes in defense of Amazon in The New Republic and Scott McLemee focuses on the relationship between Amazon and university presses in Inside Higher Ed. Both articles are quite good and address some of the questions I raised last week, although I'm not sure McLemee offers so much new to the picture. Franklin raises some important points:

The real trouble with Amazon, it seems, is that nobody truly believes we were better off without it. This is where the often-made comparison of Amazon with other monoliths such as Wal-Mart falters. Wal-Mart is not known for its catalog of obscurities; the merchandise it sells is all available elsewhere. It put the mom-and-pop drugstores and hardware stores and grocery stores out of business by offering the same items that they sold, just at lower prices.

This isn’t the case with Amazon. Before it appeared on the scene, if you lived in a part of the country that happened not to be served by a great independent bookstore, you were out of luck when it came to getting books other than bestsellers. As a child growing up in suburban Baltimore—not exactly a backwater!—I felt keenly the lack of ready access to the books that I wanted. (Remember the joke of a selection at your local mall’s Waldenbooks?) And with the quirkier independents—such as the great Louie’s to which I paid tribute above—you were at the mercy of the owner’s idiosyncrasies, which meant that you might find shelves stocked with contemporary poetry but nothing by, say, Tolstoy. Let’s not even get started on how difficult it used to be to get foreign-language books, which normally required going to a specialized store with stratospheric prices. It’s hard to complain too much about the shipping rates on sites like Amazon.fr and Amazon.de when they offer access to so many of the books of Europe.

I think the problem of distribution is pretty serious in the U.S.; outside of university towns and cosmopolitan centers, it seems much more difficult to accomplish the sort of critical mass of a reading public that would be necessary for the sort of decentralized, independent book trade that Franklin rightly points out as something of a nostalgic ideal. The point about Amazon.fr and .de also repeats a point that has been expressed by theology bloggers before- that Amazon provides access to books published elsewhere that might otherwise be inordinately expensive. Speaking from the perspective of library acquisitions, even the large book distributors like Baker & Taylor don't offer great access to continental European titles... we receive these titles through Harrassowitz rather than Yankee Book Peddler, our normal distributor. Mention of Amazon's non-U.S. branches also made me wonder how the publishing and book trade situation is faring overseas. Are there any readers who could share their perspective on this? Is the same sort of battle going on outside of the U.S.?

These qualifications about the threat of Amazon to the book trade also shouldn't be taken as a critique of those who are calling for support of Indie sellers or reform of the system. As Franklin herself points out, "if Amazon is truly endangering [publishers'] ability to bring out their books, it is their responsibility to take a stand against it." Folks are free to make of the market what they will, and a decision to work with Amazon for financial reasons by either publishers or book consumers isn't much different than Amazon's own business decisions. No one is coercing the current state of affairs, and nothing but the inertia of certain incentives is stopping anyone from doing things differently.

A few items...

2010-07-23T07:17:00.000-05:00

The Warburg Institute is running into some trouble with University of London administrators. At the same time, Peter Mack of Warwick has been chosen as the new director of the institute (you can hear an interview with him here). W4RF continues to offer updates on the situation, for those who are interested.

Brian points out the new issue of JAAR, focused on matters theological.

Oxford UP is offering McCormack's Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectic Theology for less than half of the normal paperback price.

The latest issue of Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses is out, and includes a paper on J.-M. Tillard's post-concilliar work in ecumenism, and specifically on work that influenced the 2007 Ravenna document.

Book habits

2010-07-21T15:50:00.003-05:00

I mentioned in my previous post on "The Trouble with Amazon" that I would lay out some practical ideas for engaging with the book industry. These thoughts may be pretty loose and scattered, but they're simply an attempt to get down what I bring to the table on this matter, and something of an invitation for responses and ideas from others.

One of the most significant difficulties I run into in these discussions is that I'm thinking mostly in terms of academic research literature, and this is a very different thing than someone discussing novels, or poetry, or even much of the non-fiction that is published. Academic work is such a niche market that its problems and solutions may be completely different than in other areas. What might be helpful is a state-of-the-industry report that is more realistic for the scale we are talking about here, because there's no reason to think that books on Barth or Aquinas should behave in the same way as the latest works of fiction when they hit the market.

I think it's worth considering the relationship of used bookstores to those selling all or primarily new items. We can probably all recognize the value of used booksellers, but I'm not sure what the relationship is between these sellers and the health of the industry as a whole. If we are recycling one copy of a book that is still in print by the publisher and being sold new in local stores, what is the effect of our buying it? This isn't to say, of course, that we shouldn't be buying books used- I think we should. I simply want to recognize that a used bookstore plays a very different role for book culture than does the independent new-book seller. Often I think the two can be unhelpfully lumped simply because they are both situated in contrast to the large commercial retailers.

I don't know about others, but a relatively common gift that I receive from a great aunt (or closer relations frustrated by trying to make heads or tails of my book interests) is a gift card to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders. Because of the ubiquity of these three, it's an easy recourse for making sure that the right book gets got by the gift recipient. Something like this would be great for smaller bookstores or for specific publishers, but the obvious problem is that none of these places are a one-stop ordeal where you can find virtually whatever you want... this is likely why only a few of such places offer gift cards, and why those that do (I'm guessing) don't do nearly as much business through these cards. A solution to this dilemma that might bring a lot of business to smaller outfits during the holiday season, could be a co-operative venture for gift card arrangements. Operating something like those community business discount cards that the basketball team or high school band sells you, participating publishers or booksellers could work together and accept a single card, making this sort of gift a more viable option alongside Amazon gift money. The Booksense Gift Card operated like this, but has unfortunately just recently shifted to be effective in-store only, so that you can only purchase items from the place where the gift card was originally purchased. I'm not sure what problems led to this change or how they might be avoided in the future; I'm also not sure whether such gift cards have been used by publishers (e.g., Eerdmans, Baker, IVP, and Paulist Press join together to offer a gift card redeemable at any of their websites). But it's an idea worth thinking about.

Encourage smaller stores to improve their web presence. This could be as simple as a facebook page or a home at Blogger or Wordpress, but visibility and access seem to be a primary problem in getting to a greater diversity of stores. When my wife and I took a short vacation the other week about a half-hour west of where we live, I looked up stores on Indiebound and found a small place that would have otherwise gone unnoticed (and missed out on the money we paid them for two books and lunch). You can also add stores to Indiebound yourself, so even if a bookstore you know of isn't included or doesn't have any sort of web presence, it's an easy fix and a significant help to people who are looking for places in the future. I recently added Black River Books (which I mentioned here last summer) and Second Story Books (which is a wonderful place for rare & used items... I was shocked that this wasn't already on their map, given its importance). Encouraging publishers you enjoy to improve their updating system is also helpful.

Amazon, apart from being a juggernaut with some troubling intentions, is also simply a good tool with a lot of good intentions. You might as well use it to its utmost. If you're going to buy something from there, use the student discount. Keep in mind that Amazon acts as an easy marketplace for used books, which has nothing to do with its policies towards publishers on new ones. Take advantage of the organizing capabilities of the site for wishlists and book searches, and incorporate non-Amazon items into this process through their Universal Wish-List. You can also use Amazon to find out what books are forthcoming... this helps especially with regard to the last point I made in the last paragraph, about updating systems. Often books are in Amazon well ahead of their publication date, even if the publisher itself doesn't have a user-friendly updating system... simply do a search in Amazon for what you want ("theology" or "ecclesiology" or "virtue ethics"... it's usually most helpful if search terms are pretty broad) and sort your search results by "Publication Date".

Keep in mind that buying books still helps publishers, even if it's from Amazon. For the sake of some perspective- another place that students and professors buy books is at academic conferences. These venues are popular because of the significant discounts that are often offered. But enjoying these discounts means that publishers are losing money too, perhaps a comparable amount as they would with deep Amazon discounts. Often conferences are a net loss for publishers-- and they don't help brick-and-mortar stores any more than shopping on Amazon does, even though they provide the flesh-and-blood encounters that Amazon doesn't. The point of this is to say that easy targets like Amazon don't have a monopoly on threats to the book industry. And, on the bright side, even shopping at Amazon or at a discounted conference booth keeps books moving, and that is a good thing.

A good deal of what people are trying to preserve with independent bookstores and a vibrant publishing environment is the wider discourse that is made available by print. In keeping with this goal, part of the solution should be talking about books. As a library cataloger, a student, and an academic blogger, I enjoy finding out what new work is being published. I've especially come to enjoy periodical literature because of how varied and changing it is. Within my own interests, I try to pass some of that along here on the blog. I've also contacted many readers privately when I run across something that I think may interest them in particular. In situations where there isn't a huge advertising blitz or general expectation from the reading public already in place, it's word of mouth and regular conversation that will keep literary communities functioning properly. Indeed, literary communities are more likely functioning as they should when bombardment by advertising is less involved in what gets circulated, and more reasoned review and response stands as the norm.

So these are a few scattered thoughts. Consider this an open thread on book habits, or practical aspects of engaging with published literature, maintaining an eye to the health of the industry.

Kevin Hector: Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion

2010-07-21T11:52:00.001-05:00

The first of Prof. Kevin Hector's book projects is now listed on the T&T Clark website, and will be available in 2011. Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion will appear in the Reader's Guides series, and serve as a primer for students. The volume promises to be a valuable introduction to Schleiermacher's thought- especially so, I think, because of the extent to which pedagogical concerns tend to be central to Prof. Hector's theological work.

Hector is also working on a constructive book-length project in theology and a more historical account of modern theology.

The Trouble with Amazon

2010-07-20T08:18:00.001-05:00

Last night I read Tyler Cowen's 2006 article in Slate, "What are Independent Bookstores Really Good For?", which may be familiar to some of you already. In it he made an argument against indie critiques of Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Borders, and similar larger booksellers. In defense of the chains, Cowen pointed out the increased accessibility of books for customers, and argued that allegiance to independent stores wasn't much more than a matter of sentimentality--

Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation—a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. There are similar phenomena in the world of indie music fans ("Top 40 has to be bad") and indie cinema, which rebels against stars and big-budget special effects. In each case the indie label is a deliberate marketing ploy to segregate, often artificially, one part of the market from the rest.

There were some strong critiques of Cowen's article when it came out, and it's probably no surprise that I'm also unimpressed by his argument. The article is valuable insofar as it points out that we can't simply have a knee-jerk reaction against large sellers and ignore the good things that they provide: greater access and visibility, algorithms that track buying in order to provide a bibliography of similar resources, and cheaper prices. This isn't nothing. But the gaping holes in Cowen's rosy picture also need to be addressed.

This morning, as if by providence, Dennis Johnson of MelvilleHouse offers a bleak sort of response to the story written four years ago by Cowen. In the publisher's blog Moby Lives (which you should all add to your RSS feed if you haven't already), Johnson points out some news on Amazon.com, including dropping stock, optimistic announcements from Bezos about e-book sales, and... most importantly... a devastating new essay from Colin Robinson in The Nation.

In "The Trouble with Amazon", Robinson discusses Amazon's relationship with publishers at length. Anecdotal accounts of strong-arming tactics reveal the extent to which Amazon has created trouble for the sustainability of the book industry. Included is the story of Dennis Johnson himself:

Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared to speak openly about Amazon's bullying. His story is far from atypical. In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville's distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of "co-op," money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as "kickback."

Johnson resisted Amazon's pressure and complained to Publishers Weekly about what he saw as the retailer's capo-like tactics. What happened next evidently still rankles. "I was at the Book Expo in New York and two guys from Amazon came to see me. They said that the company was watching what we were doing and that they strongly advised us to get in line. I was shocked at how blatant the pressure was." Within a couple of days Johnson noticed that the buy buttons for his books had been taken off Amazon's site, making Melville's titles unavailable.

In the end Johnson, faced with an offer it was nigh impossible to refuse, agreed to the co-op. His books' buy buttons were reinstated. Today Amazon is Melville House's biggest customer, and though Johnson still regularly flays the company on his popular publishing blog Moby Lives, he also concedes that it is highly effective at bookselling: "They make buying so easy. It's impossible to resist."

There is also some interesting commentary about the extent to which broad access has actually decreased the diversity of reading among customers. This problem is something that I think academics often fail to be aware of, because of the extent to which we are often the long end of the tail referenced below:

Though the overall number of titles published each year has risen sharply, the under-resourcing of mid-list books is producing a pattern that joins an enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles) to a Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles), with less and less in between.

Few would argue with the fact that giants like Amazon provide a lot for the customer. The question is, at what systemic cost? If publishers cannot afford to stay in business or have to charge exorbitant prices for items with lower sales (in turn creating a mess for library budgets), what will the prospects for book trade look like years from now?

Halden has brought up Amazon before, and I've also mentioned the problem of predatory pricing. I have for some time, and will continue to always link books I mention to their publisher rather than to the Amazon page. At the same time, a number of bloggers have recently mentioned the deal that Amazon is offering for students, and I confess that I signed up for it and plan on using it. One has to balance what is feasible, and in any case I don't think there's too much sense in making Amazon out to be the devil. There are good reasons, many of them financial, for buying from a large distributor (your library does, in any case, and usually at significant institutional discounts). What is most important is to be aware of the wider issues in play for those who write, publish, sell, and acquire books, and to pursue practices that are balanced and supportive of a sustainable situation for the future.

But how to do this? What are some particular problems that present themselves in academic publishing? What are some issues peculiar to the religious publishing niche that we should be aware of?

I am hesitant to make this post too long by discussing some possible answers and suggestions for these questions, so I'll continue with some of my ideas in a future post, either later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, do make sure to read Robinson's article in The Nation, subscribe to Moby Lives, and share some of your thoughts on what is happening and what can be done by individual readers, writers, publishers, and sellers.

From Church & State to Church & Inquiry to...

2010-07-19T11:42:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year, Kenneth Howell was told that his contract as an adjunct professor of religion would not be renewed at the University of Illinois (here's an article and commentary). Howell's position was peculiar-- though teaching at a public university, the instructorship is paid for and its occupant approved by St. John's Catholic Newman Center. The firing was precipitated by concerns about an email Howell sent to students in preparation for an exam that discussed homosexuality, which email has been criticized as offensive, inappropriately asserted (as "preaching" rather than "teaching"), etc.

I'm not interested in discussing the merits of this particular case and whether or not Howell was unfairly treated by the administration. In any case, there are a number of good discussions out there on both sides of the issue, and most everyone with an opinion has struck me as being pretty fair and reasonable in their points (and this state of the discussion isn't a small victory, given the perfect storm of sex, politics and religion that have come together here).

What I find sort of odd... and worth considering more directly... are two articles at IHE written by Scott Jaschik on the 15th and the 19th of this month. In "Teaching or Preaching?", Jaschik thoroughly lays out facts of the matter and discusses the varieties of opinion currently circulating. In "The Real Scandal at Illinois?" there is further consideration of what exactly is the root of the problem at UI... here the Newman Center becomes the primary object of scrutiny rather than Howell himself, and concerns are raised about its history and legitimacy within a public university setting.

In both articles, the oft-repeated concerns of church-state violations and protection of free inquiry are raised. In the second article, however, these questions strike me as culminating in a weird amalgamation of reasons that raises more questions than it answers.

Church & State

Jaschik starts out by highlighting the differing standards of teaching religions at UI; while courses in Buddhism or Methodism or Judaism are taught by religion scholars acquired through normal academic review standards, the professor of Catholic thought is nominated and paid for by a Catholic institution (though presumably approved for hire by UI). This is apparently a Very Bad Thing:

This arrangement has existed for decades, and been opposed by faculty members -- also for decades. Not only is it highly unusual for a college to give an outside group the right to screen and nominate candidates to teach, but the situation raises church-state issues at a public institution, presents issues of fairness when it is permitted for only one religious group at a secular college, and may undercut the values of the field of religious studies, faculty critics say.

All of these worries are understandable. An institution of higher education should be concerned about the quality of its religious studies courses and the threat of undue privilege offered to outside bodies with a decided interest in certain religious norms. One could easily imagine a situation where a renegade proselytizer infiltrates a classroom of critical learning in a normal academic situation; the addition of a sectarian organizational backing only increases the likelihood of such a problem. The privilege offered to professors of Catholic thought via the Newman Center would become a difference that actually makes a difference for free inquiry, and under such conditions the university would stand helpless before religious-studies-as-apologetics.

...unless, somehow, the university could develop some kind of institutional review process and executive decision-making protocol... you know, like the ability to receive complaints and fire an adjunct professor as necessary.

The odd thing about Jaschik's point, then, is that the Howell situation itself seems to present something of an argument against the concerns that led to it in the first place. If the university can end the contract of this Catholic instructor as easily as it can any other contingent faculty, then it's not very clear what exactly everyone was worried about in the first place. Does the Newman Center really exercise all that much influence, if Howell stands so decidedly at the mercy of the university?

The reader of Jaschik's article continues to be taken in circles by Nicholas Burbules, and it's not exactly clear what the problem is, exactly:

"This has never really been about just one e-mail," said Nicholas C. Burbules, a professor of education and former Senate president at the university. "This has been an arrangement that has been rife with potential for things to go wrong, and this seems to be an instance in which things did go wrong. This was foreseen and argued over for decades at the university, with faculty members and some administrators trying for years to change this arrangement."

If this is not about the recent email, then it's about the long-standing arrangement. But the arrangement itself is "rife with potential", and I can't imagine that Howell failed to have his contract renewed for being rife with any sort of potential. Certainly his predecessors weren't fired for any such reason. So what exactly is the problem? Well, Burbules says "this seems to be an instance in which things did go wrong." But is he talking about the email again here? The concern seems to vacillate between an unsavory arrangement with a Catholic institution and some specific recent occurrences. The only problem is that it's not clear why the Newman Center arrangement is anything more than "rife with potential for things to go wrong", which doesn't seem to be any sort of violation itself. And if the current problem with Ken Howell is what is actually wrong (although Burbules says that it's not the problem just before he seems to imply that it is the problem), the decision not to renew his contract seems to relieve any concerns about the Newman Center's potential for trouble. There's no question that UI is in the driver's seat here.

Church & Inquiry

The article goes on to discuss what "religious studies" should be, and offers concerns about the place of faith commitments within the field:

Ann Taves, president of the American Academy of Religion and professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said that defining religious studies as an academic field about religion, not one that seeks to promote a given religion, is a distinction that most often comes up in fund raising. But she said it was crucial to the field to maintain its independence. [...]

Taves said that she does not make this distinction to denigrate the way various religions teach their faiths to fellow believers, but to note the differing roles of religions and of religious studies faculty members. "Religions have their own obligation to teach people what it means to be a practicing Catholic or Hindu or Jew, but that's not the purpose of a [nonsectarian] university," she said. "Our goal is to teach people about religious traditions, as we do in the humanities and the liberal arts." There is nothing wrong with what religions do, "but that's a different task," she said.

As a mundane point about keeping inquiry critical, all of this is fine. I'm not sure, however, that Taves is exactly correct with her more extensive assertions. To begin, I'm curious about Jaschik's bracketed adjective "nonsectarian" within Taves' discussion of "the purpose of a university". Did this replace an originally less-clear word, or was it an editorial addition to a blank space? In any case, is it even obvious that a non-sectarian institution shouldn't hold within its academic purpose the teaching of religious practices or beliefs? There seem to be quite a few nonsectarian institutions that get along just fine teaching sectarian beliefs and practices within their walls. The University of Chicago is nonsectarian and its Divinity School is recognized as an important contributor to the religious studies field, but it also teaches theology and offers ministerial degrees. The University of Virginia is a public nonsectarian university that is well-known (and well-respected) for its religion department, though it doesn't at all shy away from engagement with religious arguments, norms, and interpretations as partners in religious studies inquiry.

Further, Taves' comments seem odd coming from a president of the AAR. This scholarly association, purportedly the primary representative of religious studies scholars in the United States, is crawling with sectarian and theological approaches to inquiry concerning religion (as is the SBL). Conference sections for theology are among the most populated at yearly meetings, and if you close your eyes and point in any direction from inside the exhibit hall, you're more likely to be singling out a religiously-affiliated or theologically-focused publisher than anything else. There are of course scholars who disagree with this interaction between religious and non-religious inquiries into religion in nonsectarian settings, but I don't quite understand why this disagreement should establish any particular ground rules for the field of the sort that Taves provides here. Nor do Taves or others in charge seem to be very much concerned about enforcing such standards, whatever they say about the state of things. In the recent past we have also seen Emilie Townes and Jeffrey Stout holding the presidency, and the work of both involves either religiously-situated theological inquiry or traditionally informed normative and ethical arguments. Next year, Kwok Pui Lan will hold the AAR presidency, another testimony to the fact that religious studies isn't nearly so distinct from religiously-normed inquiry as Taves seems to imply.

From Church & State to Church & Inquiry to...

Questions about the connection between a Catholic institution and a public university have centered around church-state violations and the legitimacy of the Newman Center's role in providing funding for Catholic Studies adjuncts at the University of Illinois. Other questions about how religious studies should best be pursued moved on to the problem of church-inquiry relations, and analogous "violations" were identified for this new boundary. What seems to be missing... and might have provided a bit more perspective for the commentary that was offered by Jaschik... is the relationship between an institution's public status and its ability to pursue free inquiry. Fixation on the church, that is, seems to have distracted from the state-inquiry relationship, which itself is "rife with potential for things to go wrong".

Haven't we been bombarded over the past few years (decades, really, but recent economic crises have instigated a new wave) with apologias for the humanities disciplines and for free inquiry in the face of a capitalist political economy and the professionalization or commercialization of the academy? Why do we move so quickly from such a struggle to what seems to be a naive conflation of the "nonsectarian" and the "public" in the current conversation about UI and Ken Howell? The argument is that the funding for the Catholic instructorship at UI is highly peculiar because of its connections to a religious body. Peculiar or not, though, does it really provide a threat to free inquiry that is very much distinct from the pressures put on universities by state budgets or more general societal standards? Aren't these dilemmas rather consistently present in the university? I don't see why the current case suddenly finds Howell's opposition jumping in bed with the "public", as if this is any protection against the compromising of free inquiry.

My argument here isn't that public institutions are simply the secular equivalent of sectarian or religious institutions. Nor am I trying to say that Howell should get his contract back-- indeed, some of my earlier points actually lean on the legitimacy of his firing in order to make their case. What I have a problem with is the apparent need to make categorical arguments about what constitutes proper inquiry and decision-making in a public institutional setting or in accordance with modern research standards. As far as I can tell, university and disciplinary standards are currently much more diverse, complicated, and ad hoc than many people seem to be implying. An argument could surely be made that this is a bad thing, but doing so strikes me as embarking on a more general conversation and not one that has much to do with Howell's instructorship in itself. It also strikes me as a rather ambitious conversation to initiate, given that current inquiry in religious and theological studies speaks so strongly against a more monolithic notion of secularity and the religions.

A few items...

2010-07-16T12:20:00.002-05:00

Nathan Ihara's recent article in the LA Weekly laments the fact that “We are sold books the same way we are sold cell phones, as if the latest models deserve the most attention” and makes a case for a renewal of attention to older, better books. Melville House brought the article to my attention, and is a part of the solution in its release of neglected gems. Duke UP and Princeton UP have also taken the opportunity to mention the importance of publisher backlists. Here at clavi non defixi I have tried to maintain these sorts of values as well.

Two theology students with Wheaton connections have work coming out in IJST-- Stephen Pardue is a doctoral student here and has an article on Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium II. Peter Kline, who graduated with me a few years back and is now at Vanderbilt for doctoral studies, has an article on missional ecclesiology in Jenson and Jüngel.

Collectanea Augustiniana is an odd book series-- it has jumped back and forth between various publishers, has a rather spotty online presence, is published rather sporadically, etc.-- but it is worth the difficulty of following. Newly published in the series is the first part of Frederick Van Fleteren's translation of the classic Life of Augustine, from Louis Sébastien's magisterial Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles. Sections of the Mémoires were translated into English during the 18th century (I have run across two volumes on Christ and the apostles and a volume on the Arian controversy), and most of the original series is available in fulltext on GoogleBooks (although I cannot find vol.xiii, here or in other digital libraries... please share if you have any information on it!). There will be two more forthcoming parts of the English version of the Augustine volume, covering the Donatist and Pelagian controversies. UPDATE: Thanks to Walter Dunphy for pointing out a fulltext version of the original Vie de Saint Augustin.

More on the Martin Stone plagiarism situation, with some relevant commentary for academic publishing more generally. Interesting to note, I did a search for Martin Stone because I remembered mentioning him in the past, and his work with John Doyle on Cajetan popped up. Since that posting, KU Leuven has removed his faculty page, and apparently the Cajetan volume has even been changed. Cornell UP (distributing for Leuven) has removed Stone as editor and replaced him with Victor Salas. This strikes me as an odd correction to make... not the retraction of Stone's editorial role, but the addition of Salas. Perhaps the project wasn't very far along, or Salas did a good bit of editorial work behind the scenes to begin with... but the update still seems odd.

Jeffrey Stout on the theological task

2010-07-14T11:41:00.000-05:00

This description isn't meant to be exhaustive, but it offers some helpful guidance as far as its three-sentence scope goes:

"The vocation of theologians, as Hans Frei once said, is akin to the calling of Geertzian ethnographers. Their main expressive task, of course, is to make explicit the commitments implicit in a community's practices as an aid to reflective self-understanding. But their contribution to discourse outside of the church consists in a kind of thick description that allows fellow citizens to correct prejudice and misunderstanding concerning what believers think and care about." (Democracy and Tradition, 112)

I imagine the purposes outlined in the second and third sentences could also be readily switched... that is, theological work can correct misunderstandings and prejudices of believers and can work to assist reflective self-understanding on the societal level. It's also worth considering how theology acts as both a preface to discourse and/or as a technical discourse in itself (this distinction is probably valid for many other academic disciplines too. I think it is quite related to current problems in the state of the humanities insofar as the relationship between discipline and discourse effects the values of disciplinary inquiry and the institutional structures that are formed or deformed in response to these values)

Sarah Coakley & a makeshift letterpress cross

2010-07-09T13:23:00.007-05:00

With Ben working on next week's Sarah Coakley Symposium and Anna discussing the importance of beauty in books, this seemed an appropriate discovery to mention for an end-of-the-week post.

I was listening to a short documentary on Firefly Press of Massachusetts, a printer that has been a part of the recent American craft revival of letterpress.

About three quarters of the way through the film, there is mention of the centrality of type over image engravings for the work that the Press does... as the narrator says, "typography is always trump." In one instance, the printer needed a Maltese cross and came up with an appropriately typographical (if cannibalistic) solution. Four "I" blocks were cut, beveled, and joined to form a makeshift cross.

The film then went on to show what the cross was for; it was a print announcing an upcoming ordination. I was surprised to see the name of the ordinand as none other than Sarah Coakley.

Poking around to confirm that this was the same Sarah Coakley, I found mention of a 2000 ordination in her T&T Clark author profile, rather than the July 1, 2001 date mentioned on the Firefly print. I was undeterred, however, suspecting that the ordination of 2000 was to the diaconate rather than the priesthood. It seemed a bit too much of a coincidence that two Sarah Coakley's would be ordained over such a small span of time as two years (although it is a bit confusing that there is a Dorchester, Massachusetts and a Dorchester in England, each close to where Coakley apparently assists in parish ministry in either country. Coakley's Dorchester is presumably the one in England, however, as it is a separate diocese and has a Bishop Colin as mentioned in the print. The prints must have been made in Massachusetts before shipping out across the Atlantic).

In any case, I went on to look for proof of a 2001 ordination to the priesthood and found a brief mention of it by Coakley herself in a 2006 essay on "Theological Scholarship as Religious Vocation". An excerpt is worth including here at length:

"[...] in practice we all tend to lead schizoid lives of some sort or another: we “perform” here together, for instance (in the relatively protected realm of the Association of Theological Schools), with one set of semiotics that conform to the theology/ministry pole (using relatively pietistic language, or appealing to church experience without further methodological explication, for instance); and we “perform” somewhat differently, in the more critically hostile, or secularized, realms of the guilds of the SBL, AAR, American Historical Association or American Philosophical Association. We are all to some degree intellectual chameleons. But I have come to question, especially since my own recent ordination to the priesthood in 2001 (and my transition thereby into the public celebration of the sacraments at Harvard Divinity School), whether this accustomed schizoid dance of the church-scholar will any longer do [...]"

Someone at the symposium will have to speak with Professor Coakley during a break and ask whether she has seen the film and noticed her brief appearance.

Round-up of some new journal issues, articles, and a CFP

2010-07-08T11:36:00.000-05:00

In the July issue of The Journal of Religion, there is a 34 page review article of Taylor's A Secular Age divided into eight sections written by eight different professors from all committees of the Divinity School, each considering the work from the perspective of their field. Taylor has also contributed a separate response.

The latest issue of The Journal of Modern History is out and focuses on the theme of "The Persistence of Religion in Modern Europe".

Scott Williams has an article in Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales on the reception of Augustine's account of the generation of the Word through Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus.

Eugenia Russell, who edited a volume on Byzantine spirituality last fall, has two new articles out: "Two Greek excerpts of Johannes Cuno (1463-1513)" in Renaissance Studies publishes some texts of this Dominican that were concerned with the dissemination of the Greek language in the West. "Nicholas Kavasilas Chamaëtos (c.1322-c.1390)" in Nottingham Medieval Studies offers a new examination of Kavasilas, attempting to place him within contemporary Byzantine disputes over the relationship between secular and spiritual wisdom, and in particular within this dilemma as it played out in the hesychast controversy. The issue of Nottingham Medieval Studies does not appear to be online yet, although the link above provides ordering details for the hardcopy.

A new journal to check out: Diaconia: Journal for the Study of Christian Social Practice. The first issue is now available to download in pdf, although the journal doesn't seem to be open access.

A longer-term CFP to consider, The Monist will have a theme issue on "Naturalizing Religious Belief", to be published in July 2013. Submissions are due July 2012.

Vasileios Syros at the Martin Marty Center

2010-07-06T16:54:00.001-05:00

I just noticed that Vasileios Syros has been announced as a senior research fellow at the Martin Marty Center of the Divinity School for 2010-2011. I took a seminar with Prof. Syros on medieval political thought at the Committee for Social Thought, and a research paper for this seminar was the source of my upcoming article, "Melchizedek as Exemplar for Kingship in Twelfth Century Political Thought". I've also mentioned Syros here before with regard to a book series that he edits on medieval intellectual history.

Syros's project is tentatively titled, "Jewish Political and Religious Thought at the Intersection of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: The interaction of the Jewish and Christian political and religious traditions between the Mediterranean and the Alps." He is scheduled to present his work in a symposium on January 27th, which I'm sure I'll mention again closer to the date for those who are interested in attending.

A few items...

2010-07-06T11:32:00.002-05:00

Some new articles from theology bloggers. Tim Furry's "Analogous Analogies? Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth" is out in the Scottish Journal of Theology and Nathan Crawford's "Theology as Improvisation: Seeking the Unstructured Form of Theology with David Tracy" is out in the Irish Theological Quarterly.

Some comments in light of last week's incident at Amazon.com, reflecting on the importance of diversity in book jobbers, stores, and other distributors.

James J. O'Donnell reviews the Kindle. There are some good thoughts in his talk about the abominable state of metadata amidst the massive access to digital texts that we now enjoy, and I think I'll have to go deeper into this on another post in the near future.

J. Kameron Carter has been blogging for a little while now, but I'm a bit late in noticing. Thanks to Adam Kotsko for sharing his latest post on an American theology of freedom.

Another belated Independence Day reading... analysis of Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence has revealed an interesting change in terminology during the writing and re-writing of the text.

Kurt Koch of Basel was recently announced as Walter Kasper's successor to head the PCPCU. Welcomes have come in from the WCC and the Russian Orthodox Church.