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790St. Augustine on text and reality (and a little Gadamerian spice)Heythrop Journal 50 (1): 98-108. 2009.One way of viewing the organizing structure of the Confessions is to see it as an engagement with various texts at different phases of St. Augustine’s life. In the early books of the Confessions, Augustine describes the disordered state that made him unable to read any text (sacred or profane) properly. Yet following his conversion his entire orientation— not only to texts but also to reality as a whole—changes. This essay attempts to trace the winding paths that lead up to Augustine’s conversio…Read more
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54Inmates, Education, and the Public Good: Deploying Catholic Social Thought to Deconstruct the Us‐Versus‐Them DichotomyHeythrop Journal 56 (5): 769-777. 2015.Mass incarceration has become a flashpoint in a number of recent political and public policy debates. Consensus about how to balance the just punishment of offenders with the humanitarian goal of providing inmates with genuine opportunities for reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society is lacking. Unfortunately, a dualistic “us-versus-them” narrative surrounding these issues has become entrenched, occluding fruitful dialogue and obscuring our ability to see the detrimental e…Read more
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41Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80 (4): 642-646. 2006.Book review: Who's Afraid of Postmodernism.
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2461Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved SoulsPhilosophy and Literature 35 (2): 251-268. 2011.Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his …Read more
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1867Gadamer on the Event of Art, the Other, and a Gesture Toward a Gadamerian Approach to Free Jazz"Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (1). 2016.Several prominent contemporary philosophers, including Jürgen Habermas, John Caputo, and Robert Bernasconi, have at times painted a somewhat negative picture of Gadamer as not only an uncritical traditionalist, but also as one whose philosophical project fails to appreciate difference. Against such claims, I argue that Gadamer’s reflections on art exhibit a genuine appreciation for alterity not unrelated to his hermeneutical approach to the other. Thus, by bringing Gadamer’s reflections on our e…Read more
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26The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2): 374-378. 2008.
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903Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, by Jean-Luc Marion, trans. Jeffrey L. Kossky (review)Ars Disputandi 5. 2005.
Irving, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Hans-Georg Gadamer |
Hermeneutics |
Aesthetics |
Continental Philosophy |