John Caputo

What to Believe? is an engaging introduction to radical theology for spiritual seekers, "Nones," and others outside the academy as well as students in philosophy, religion, and theology departments who are curious about what religion can mean today, 60 years after the revolutionary "death of God" movement. Radical theology is post-theism--atheism about theism. Rather than a personal God, we personify God--we give a name to sense of meaning that we cannot name as an act of imagination, a reflection of an idea that is not supernatural but resonant within human consciousness and the world at large and available through works of art or scientific encounters. It negates typical binaries like religious and secular, theist and atheist, faithful and rational. For Caputo, God is not a question about the existence of a being but rather a question about the worth of the world.

The question of Derrida and religion may be thought of in three stages. This chapter addresses these three stages by arguing that when early on Derrida undertakes a deconstruction of ontotheology one ought not to be too quick to say that he is not a man of religion, and when later on when he speaks of his religion one must understand this religion is also without religion. The chapter assesses Derrida's fortunes amidst the current renewal of anti‐religion. From the start, for all his seeming godlessness, there was the trace of theology in what Derrida was saying, a ghost that constantly haunted him and disturbed his readers. When he wrote that différance is neither a word nor a concept, neither sensible nor supersensible, neither this nor that, that sounded like Meister Eckhart and other negative theologians.

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in the rural farmlands of southern Germany. Raised in a conservative Catholic family, his earliest aspirations were to the Catholic priesthood. His earliest philosophical interests were in medieval scholastic logic, which first brought him in contact with husserl's Logical Investigations (see Article 15). Seeing in phenomenology the antidote to the “unphilosophy” of psychologism, his habilitation dissertation (1916) interpreted the speculative grammar of Thomas of Erfurt, a fourteenth‐century Scotistic logician, in the light of Husserl's theory of a pure a priori grammar.

This landmark collection features selected writings by John D. Caputo, one of the most creative and influential thinkers working in the philosophy of religion today. B Keith Putt presents 21 of Caputo's most significant contributions from his distinguished 40-year career. Putt's thoughtful editing and arrangement highlights how Caputo's multidimensional thought has evolved from radical hermeneutics to radical theology. A guiding introduction situates Caputo's corpus within the context of debates in the Continental philosophy of religion and exclusive interview with him adds valuable information about his own views of his work.

I distinguish between the deep culture and the manifest culture, the relationship between the two constituting a circle, which constitutes the circulation of a radical theology of culture. The deep culture surfaces in the manifest, and the manifest draws upon the depths; neither one without the other. My hypothesis is that religion is an expression of the deep culture and for that reason, religion is not accidentally violent; religion is violent in virtue of something essential to religion. Religion is playing with the fire of the concealed depths, of the unconditional, of the impossible, of the undeconstructible. Religion is the best way to save the world, but it also the best way to burn it down. It is both of these things and in virtue of the same property. This is not to say that religion is structurally violent, always and necessarily violent. It is structurally ambiguous, dangerous, on the verge of violence, whipsawing between radical violence and radical non-violence, between martyrdom and murder. Religious beliefs are not the cause of the violence but often a façade for deeper, visceral nationalism or ethnic hatred, The reaction of Christian right to the contemporary world is naive and simplistic but not superficial; it reflects a visceral fear of the postmodern world. Religion is a matter of being claimed by something unconditional, which means it should have the good sense not to lay claim to it. We should never trust anything that has not passes through that apophasis. Before any claims we make, we are laid claim to in advance by the unconditional, the undeconstructible, which Schelling calls the prius, the “un-pre-thinkable”. The unconditional in the optimal sense is love, which is an expenditure made without the expectation of a return, like loving one’s enemies, which is impossible, the impossible. But love does not get a pass. What would we not do for love? In that question is concentrated all the ambiguity of love, all the courage of the martyr, but no less the violence of the suicide bomber.

After reviewing the recent publications of Richard Kearney, appearing between 2017 and 2021, including an anthology of his essential writings over his career, and covering topics such as hospitality, God, religion, anatheism, theopoetics, hermeneutics, and touch, there follows a critical engagement with Kearney's work, one that sets out in particular how, despite the very considerable overlap in our work, as fellow travelers in continental philosophy of religion and hermeneutics, our positions differ on what we mean by God and by welcoming the tout autre.