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Material Mystery considers three apparently anthropocentric myths
that are central to Abrahamic religions-those of the primal human,
the incarnated and possibly divine redeemer, and the resurrected
body. At first glance, these stories reinforce a human-centered
theology and point to a very anthropomorphic God. Taking them
seriously seems to ignore the material turn in the humanities
entirely, with the same sort of willful ignorance that some of our
politicians show in declaring that their myths count as facts, or
that the point of the rest of the world is to further human
consumption. But it is possible, Karmen MacKendrick shows, to read
these figures through a particular tradition that emerges from the
Hebrew Bible, the tradition of Wisdom as a creative force. Wisdom
texts are common across the ancient Near East. As the idea of
creative Wisdom develops from antiquity into the middle ages, it
gathers philosophical influences from a range of philosophical
traditions. This exuberantly promiscuous impurity-intellectual,
artistic, and theological-generates new interpretive possibilities.
In these interpretations, each human-like figure opens up onto the
world''s matter, as an interdependent part of it, and matter is
thoroughly mixed with divinity. Such mythic readings complement our
factual, scientific understanding of the material world, to engage
wider kinds of knowing and affective attention-particularly
Wisdom''s combination of care and delight.
The articles collected in this volume share a very similar goal: to
decolonize our understanding of antiquity, thus allowing modernity
to converse with antiquity without constraining the latter to be
either the direct precedent or the thoroughly other of the former.
It is certainly true that the past is a foreign country. However,
history has repeatedly demonstrated that colonialism never
contributed to mutual understanding and constructive exchange of
ideas, and that such is the dialogue we should strive forthwith our
contemporaries as well as with our ancestors.
Material Mystery considers three apparently anthropocentric myths
that are central to Abrahamic religions-those of the primal human,
the incarnated and possibly divine redeemer, and the resurrected
body. At first glance, these stories reinforce a human-centered
theology and point to a very anthropomorphic God. Taking them
seriously seems to ignore the material turn in the humanities
entirely, with the same sort of willful ignorance that some of our
politicians show in declaring that their myths count as facts, or
that the point of the rest of the world is to further human
consumption. But it is possible, Karmen MacKendrick shows, to read
these figures through a particular tradition that emerges from the
Hebrew Bible, the tradition of Wisdom as a creative force. Wisdom
texts are common across the ancient Near East. As the idea of
creative Wisdom develops from antiquity into the middle ages, it
gathers philosophical influences from a range of philosophical
traditions. This exuberantly promiscuous impurity-intellectual,
artistic, and theological-generates new interpretive possibilities.
In these interpretations, each human-like figure opens up onto the
world''s matter, as an interdependent part of it, and matter is
thoroughly mixed with divinity. Such mythic readings complement our
factual, scientific understanding of the material world, to engage
wider kinds of knowing and affective attention-particularly
Wisdom''s combination of care and delight.
Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do
its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a
longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse
attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been
inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views,
Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both
to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but
always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions
center on four sets of intertwined themes-secrecy and confession,
asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and
eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they
explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden,
the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the
repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship
between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of
its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the
author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that
lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of
Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than
mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they
plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers
within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing
satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon
other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior
Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history,
theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the
conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with
such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard,
Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only
a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a
multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive
elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.
Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source
of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing "God" and the
comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But
religious thought has always been more interesting-indeed, a rich
source of endlessly unfolding questions. With questions from the
1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting
point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern
reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the
oneness of God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection
to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine
of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in
questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in
totalities-more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically
integral to wholeness. Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we
find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not
lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated
and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many,
before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly
entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred,
with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its
duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex,
because theological considerations lead us not to the security of
an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the
presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually
peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh. Written out of
MacKendrick's extensive background in both recent and late-ancient
philosophy, this moving and poetic book can also be an inspiration
to anyone, scholar or lay reader, seeking to find contemporary
significance in these ancient theological doctrines.
Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do
its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a
longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse
attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been
inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views,
Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both
to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but
always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions
center on four sets of intertwined themes-secrecy and confession,
asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and
eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they
explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden,
the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the
repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship
between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of
its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the
author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that
lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of
Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than
mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they
plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers
within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing
satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon
other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior
Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history,
theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the
conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with
such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard,
Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only
a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a
multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive
elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.
Today, body and language are prominent themes throughout
philosophy. Each is strange enough on its own; this book asks what
sense we might make of them together. Words reach out. Hands pick
up books; eyes or fingertips scan text. But just where, if at all,
do words and bodies touch?In a trio of paired chapters, each
juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical
exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of speech:
the touch, the fold, and the cut. In the first pairing,
resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a
chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to
argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory
modes in which the resurrected body is presented. T. S. Eliot's
"Ash Wednesday" is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the
fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an
extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an
intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and
tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea
of inscribed bodies, of the cut. Theologically and philosophically
sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in
real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest
levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday
life.
Today, body and language are prominent themes throughout
philosophy. Each is strange enough on its own; this book asks what
sense we might make of them together. Words reach out. Hands pick
up books; eyes or fingertips scan text. But just where, if at all,
do words and bodies touch?In a trio of paired chapters, each
juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical
exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of speech:
the touch, the fold, and the cut. In the first pairing,
resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a
chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to
argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory
modes in which the resurrected body is presented. T. S. Eliot's
"Ash Wednesday" is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the
fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an
extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an
intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and
tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea
of inscribed bodies, of the cut. Theologically and philosophically
sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in
real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest
levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday
life.
Philosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical
musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter,
souls without bodies. Nevertheless, voices resonate among bodies,
among texts, and across denotation and sound; they are singular, as
unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are
material, somatic, and musical. But voices are also meaningful-they
give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential
to sense yet in excess of it. They can be neither reduced to
neurology nor silenced in abstraction. They complicate the logos of
the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Through
explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and
semiotics, all interwoven with song, The Matter of Voice works
toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial
voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.
Theology usually appears to us to be dogmatic, judgmental,
condescending, maybe therapeutic, or perhaps downright
fantastical-but seldom enticing. Divine Enticement takes as its
starting point that the meanings of theological concepts are not so
much logical, truth-valued propositions-affirmative or negative-as
they are provocations and evocations. Thus it argues for the
seductiveness of both theology and its subject-for, in fact,
infinite seduction and enticement as the very sense of theological
query. The divine name is one by which we are drawn toward the
limits of thought, language, and flesh. The use of language in such
conceptualization calls more than it designates. This is not a flaw
or a result of vagueness or imprecision in theological language but
rather marks the correspondence of such language to its subject:
that which, outside of or at the limit of our thought, draws us as
an enticement to desire, not least to intellectual desire. Central
to the text is the strange semiotics of divine naming, as a call on
that for which there cannot be a standard referent. The
entanglement of sign and body, not least in interpretations of the
Christian incarnation, both grounds and complicates the theological
abstractions. A number of traditional notions in Christian theology
are reconceived here as enticements, modes of drawing the desires
of both body and mind: faith as "thinking with assent"; sacraments
as "visible words" read in community; ethics as responsiveness to
beauty; prayer as the language of address; scripture as the story
of meaning-making. All of these culminate in a sense of a call to
and from the purely possible, the open space into which we can be
enticed, within which we can be divinely enticing.
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