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CFP: Religion and Modernity in a Secular City

Thursday, March 11, 2010 — Nate Kerr

I thought some readers of this blog might be interested in the call for papers for the following conference, to be co-hosted by The Centre for Religion and Culture and The Program on Religion, Politics and Economics at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin, 16-18 September, 2010:

“Religion and Modernity in a Secular City”

Writing from Vichy, France in early 1940, Walter Benjamin articulated what many theologians secretly feared in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte by portraying theology as the hunchback that must keep out of sight. However, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time.” This startling reversal reveals that the extent to which Enlightenment secularization imagined it could map the rational world onto a manipulable grid, manifested in the global spread of political, economic and social structures that have attempted to inscribe the sacred within a strictly private sphere, is increasingly being called into question by the continuing public presence of political theologies. However, the question of what this new visibility of religion might mean in the context of the supposedly secular city remains less than clear. We invite proposals for papers, to be delivered in no more than 30 minutes, that address this broad theme from theology, philosophy, political theory, economics, sociology, as well as cultural and biblical studies. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward.

The language of the conference will be English. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a CV, should be sent simultaneously to both the conference organizers via email no later than 30 April 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 14 May 2010. The conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie. Generous grants are available for presenters to cover the costs of registration, accommodation and meals. 

For further information please contact the conference organizers at the following addresses: 

More information can also be found here.

Posted in Conference announcement. Leave a Comment »

For the Record: A Rejoinder

Monday, March 16, 2009 — Nate Kerr

Dan Barber recently entered a brief on behalf of the recently published “old debate” on this very blog.  As regards to my own response to Dan’s essay in the latest volume of Political Theology, Dan’s questions and points, which he entered “for the record,” are well taken.  I want to be clear from the outset that in my response to Dan, I did not necessarily mean to write in the spirit of non-combat and judgment; and in fact, it is neither combat nor judgment as such that I would hope would occur but rather conversation. And I do think Dan is right that the most interesting point of conversation between the two of us in relation to our own respective “projects” would occur at the points of our divergence and convergence with regards to the reading of Yoder vis-a-vis analogy. I thought that I had tried to establish that point of conversation; however, to the extent that my piece has not adequately carried out or fostered conversation on that single point, it signals the need for a conversation that has yet to occur. It would be my hope that we could take up that point of conversation (even if it occurs at points of “combat” or “debate”) in the appropriate forum (even if that can’t be here — and I’m not sure it can be).

Having said that, I would nevertheless want to maintain that there is more going on in my piece than what Dan has portrayed here, more than just a “parroting” of Milbankian and analogical critiques of immanence, and more than a mere labelling of the Deleuzian position as idolatrous. And so, if I may, I would like to make a few points of my own “for the record”:

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Posted in boredom. 18 Comments »

Nate Kerr’s Response to Tim Furry

Monday, December 8, 2008 — Nate Kerr

My response to Tim Furry’s three-part critical review of my book has now been posted here.

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Summary and Review of Christ, History and Apocalyptic

Friday, November 21, 2008 — Nate Kerr

Tim Furry has begun a two-part summary and review of my recent book on his blog, to which I will eventually be responding with a guest post. 

Also, thanks to the efforts of Ben Myers over at the Faith and Theology blog, Cascade books is offering a special “limited time” 40% discount on purchases of my book.  To receive the discount, just go to the Wipf and Stock/Cascade Books website, and when you proceed to check out enter the special coupon code:  KERR40

UPDATE:  Part II of Tim’s review, with his initial set of critical comments and questions, has now been posted here.

UPDATE 2:  Part III of Tim’s review as now been posted here, along with an update/addendum here.

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Christ, History and Apocalyptic released in the U.S.

Friday, October 24, 2008 — Nate Kerr

Christ, History and ApocalypticBack in the summer, I posted an announcement regarding my forthcoming book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission.   I am pleased to announce that the book has now been released in the United States through Cascade Books, in their Theopolitical Visions series. Ben Myers has graciously posted an excerpt from chapter 5 of the book entitled “John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History” on his Faith and Theology blog. Should you wish to have the book ordered for your own personal or institutional libraries, U.S. readers can now purchase the book at a web discount from the publisher here.   Outside of the U.S. the book will be released at the end of this month by SCM Press as part of its Veritas series, and can currently be ordered at a discount here.

Here are the endorsements for the book as provided by Stanley Hauerwas, Graham Ward, and Nicholas M. Healy:

“A rare gift—a critic from whom you learn. Though I do not agree with all of his criticisms of my work, Kerr—drawing imaginatively and creatively on the work of Troeltsch and Barth—has rightly framed the questions central to my and Yoder’s project. We are in his debt for having done so. In this book, Kerr not only establishes himself as one of the most able readers of my and Yoder’s work, but he is clearly a theologian in his own right. We will have much to learn from in the future.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

“This is a timely book that traverses twentieth century theology to develop a distinctive understanding of church engagement with the world. Finely executed and acutely discerning, it opens up an ecclesiology that is neither culturally accommodating nor counter-cultural. Conceiving the church as fundamentally dispossessive and missionary, Kerr announces a genuinely apocalyptic Christian politics. This is excellent theology for the up and coming generation.”
—Graham Ward, Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester

“This is a really exciting book: engaging, provocative, and—above all—constructive. Kerr seeks to reaffirm the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history in the face of modernity’s attempts to subsume Christ into our history. In spite of the complexity of its material, this fascinating book is so remarkably clear throughout that I found it hard to put down. It should not be ignored.”
-Nicholas M. Healy, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Associate Dean, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. John’s University, Queens, New York

For those interested, I am also reposting the book description and table of contents in hiding.

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Posted in Barth, Hauerwas, mission, politics, publications, Shameless Promotion, Troeltsch, Yoder. 12 Comments »

Christ, History and Apocalyptic

Monday, June 30, 2008 — Nate Kerr

Christ, History and ApocalypticSeveral times now, Adam has invited me to post to this blog. I am a frequent commenter, and hope occasionally to post some theological and philosophical reflections for engagement and discussion. However, as this is a blog in part designed for the discussion of current and ongoing work, I thought that I would (shamelessly) take the opportunity in my first post to announce the forthcoming publication of my book in SCM Press’ Veritas series:  Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission.  Here is a description of the book (a table of contents is hidden below for those interested):

“This book engages in a defense of Christian apocalyptic as the criterion for evaluating the ‘truth’ of history and of history’s relation to the transcendent political reality that theology calls ‘the Kingdom of God’.  The heart of this work comprises an original genealogical analysis of twentieth-century theological encounters with the modern historicist problematic through a series of critical engagements with the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Howard Yoder.  Bringing these thinkers into conversation at key points with the work of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, John Milbank, and Michel de Certeau, among others, this genealogy analyses and exposes the ideologically ‘Constantinian’ assumptions shared by both modern ‘liberal’ and contemporary ‘post-liberal’ accounts of Christian ‘politics’ and ‘mission’.  On the basis of a rereading of John Howard Yoder’s place within this genealogy, the author outlines an alternative ‘apocalyptic historicism’, which conceives the work of Christian politics as a mode of subversive, missionary encounter between church and world.  The result is a vision of history that at once calls for and is empowered by a Christian apocalyptic politics, in which the ideologically reductionist concerns for political effectiveness and productivity are surpassed by way of a missionary praxis of subversion and liberation rooted in liturgy and doxology.”

The book is scheduled for an October 31 release and will be launched at this year’s AAR in Chicago.  It is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.  Of course (and again, shamelessly), I encourage each of you to go ahead and order this volume for your libraries, personal and/or institutional.  But really, in the least, I just wanted to make you aware of the work I have been doing and what is coming of that work.

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Posted in publications, Shameless Promotion. Tags: . 9 Comments »