Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Is God Talk Necessary? with John D. Caputo (Part 1)


Usually I give a short intro but time is pressing this moment. In sort, John and I have travelled different roads but have gotten to the same point spiritually. For myself, I came by Process Theology (Whitehead) via Continental Thought. For John, he came by progressive Catholicism which finds him in the radical (religious) theological side of things. I have many of his books and am recommending the current new series of five books below. My first meeting with John was through hosting him and Peter Rollins through my computer via GCAS many years ago. I've stayed aware of John's work since then (and re Pete, I have met him personally and listened to him many times via Rob Bell and Mars Hill, which then was an ex-vangelical progress Christian movement known as the Emergent Church). Since, I've left all forms of evangelicalism behind preferring to be a post-evangelical progressive via Process Theology (which is a form of "radical theology" in its own right without forsaking Christ nor the Cross).

All for now. Enjoy!

R.E. Slater
November 14, 2024




Is God Talk Necessary?
with John D. Caputo (Part 1)

Ilia Delio sits down with philosopher-theologian John D. Caputo (Jack). Ilia asks Jack about how he got from Continental Philosophy to what he calls weak theology, and theo-poetics. Then they tackle the big, enduring question Jack and Ilia like to often ask—what is going on “in the name of God?” and why it might benefit us to stop talking about “God.”

ABOUT JOHN D. CAPUTO

“The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world.”

John D. Caputo, the Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Villanova University) and the Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus (Syracuse University), is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who works in the area of “weak” or “radical” theology, drawing upon hermeneutic and deconstructive theory. His most recent books are What to Believe: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (2023) and Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (2022). His The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence in the category of constructive theology.








* * * * * * * *


Most Recent Series by John D. Caputo


Volume 1 brings together the earliest publications of John D. Caputo when the young “Catholic philosopher” was working out the relationship of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart to what Martin Heidegger called “thinking” and “Being.” The collection reflects an early interest in mathematical logic, includes his work on Kant and the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, and extends to the essays of the early 1980s where we can see the main lines of Radical Hermeneutics beginning to take shape.

“John Caputo’s extraordinary work from his earliest work on Eckhart, Heidegger and others to his later work on Derrida, and his contemporary philosophical theology have been a singular resource for all serious contemporary scholars. I heartily endorse this project.” —David Tracy, Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies,, University of Chicago Divinity School

“The John D. Caputo Archives comprise an essential resource for all scholars working in contemporary European Philosophy, especially Continental Philosophy of Religion.” —Kevin Hart, Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia



Volume 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction covers the period when Caputo first worked out his notion of “radical hermeneutics,” where the strategies and resources of deconstruction prove to be the way to come to grips with the “difficulty” of the hermeneutic situation, in which radical does not mean radically grounded but radically exposed to instability and undecidability. In essays on Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida, he shows how hermeneutics is inwardly disturbed by deconstruction and deconstruction is inevitably an account of the hermeneutic condition, where each is the condition of the other. Here, too, Caputo makes his first explorations into the implications of deconstruction for faith, ethics and religion. The volume includes several essays previously unpublished or unavailable.




The Return of Religion,Volume 3 of this collection of John D. Caputo’s papers, covers the period when the “return of religion” was in the air, and, in particular, when Caputo was conducting a dialogue between Jacques Derrida and leading theologians and philosophers of religion at the Villanova University conferences. Here are the papers from that era, several of them originally published in hard-to-find forums, that articulate just what it is that theology has to learn from deconstruction—and deconstruction from theology—in the search for a postmodern or postsecular approach to religion. In these essays, Caputo enters into dialogue with Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, and Wyschogrod, among others, addressing such themes as radical hermeneutics, the gift, the tout autre, the impossible, the il y a, Catholicism and postmodernity, and religion without religion.

Volume 4: Continental Philosophy of Religion collects the papers published by Caputo at the time a continental version of the philosophy of religion was taking shape, when postmodern theory provided a different way to think about God and religion, which in turn opened up a new way to think about postmodern theory. With papers on Augustine, Radical Orthodoxy, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Gadamer, and Marion and others, Caputo questions the distinction between theism and atheism, the religious and the secular, in search of the God who comes after the God of metaphysics in a religion without religion.

Volume 5: Coming out as a Theologian collects the papers published by Caputo during his first years in the Syracuse University Religion Department when, as Catherine Keller said, he “came out of the closet as a theologian”—a “weak” or “radical” theologian, nothing confessional or denominational. Caputo here puts deconstruction into the service of a “constructive theology” of the “event” in a series of lively essays, including several previously unpublished pieces, while also engaging the work of T. J. J. Altizer, Ted Jennings, Louis Mackey, Jean-Luc Marion, Calvin Schrag, Mark Taylor, Merold Westphal, David Wood, and Edith Wyschogrod.

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Other Books by John D. Caputo






* * * * * * * *

John D. Caputo


John D. Caputo
Born
John David Caputo

October 26, 1940 (age 84)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Alma mater
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
Institutions
Doctoral studentsJames K. A. Smith
Other notable studentsTheodore George
Main interests
Notable ideas
Websitehttps://johndcaputo.com/

John David Caputo (born October 26, 1940) is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University.[1] Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity[2] and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology.[3] Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.

Education

Caputo received his BA in 1962 from La Salle University, his MA in 1964 from Villanova University, and his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from Bryn Mawr College.[4]

Work

Caputo is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy, with a particular expertise in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Over the years, he has developed a deconstructive hermeneutics that he calls radical hermeneutics, which is highly influenced by the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Additionally, Caputo has developed a distinctive approach to religion that he calls weak theology. Recently, his most important work has been to rebut the charges of relativism made against deconstruction by showing that deconstruction is organized around the affirmation of certain unconditional ethical and political claims.

Caputo has a special interest in continental approaches to the philosophy of religion. Some of the ideas Caputo investigates in his work include the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and others; the critique of ontotheology; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with Augustine of Hippo and Paul of Tarsus; and medieval metaphysics and mysticism. In the past, Caputo has taught courses on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Positions held

Caputo taught philosophy at Villanova University from 1968 to 2004. He was appointed the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University in 1993. Caputo was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, where he taught in both the departments of philosophy and religion from 2004 until his retirement in 2011. He is emeritus professor at both Villanova University and Syracuse University and continues to write and lecture in both the United States and Europe. He is active in the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and he chairs the board of editors for the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Notable former students of Caputo

Bibliography

  • (1978) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Ohio University Press)
  • (1982) Heidegger and Aquinas (Fordham University Press)
  • (1986) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Fordham University Press paperback with a new "Introduction")
  • (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Indiana University Press)
  • (1993) Against Ethics - Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Indiana University Press)
  • (1993) Demythologizing Heidegger (Indiana University Press)
  • (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press)
  • (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed./auth. (Fordham University Press)
  • (2000) More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Indiana University Press)
  • (2001) On Religion (Routledge Press)
  • (2006) Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon Press)
  • (2006) The Weakness of God (Indiana University Press)
  • (2007) After the Death of God, with Gianni Vattimo (Columbia University Press)
  • (2007) How to Read Kierkegaard (Granta; Norton, 2008)
  • (2007) What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Baker Academic)
  • (2013) The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press)
  • (2014) Truth [Philosophy in Transit] (Penguin)
  • (2015) Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Fortress Press)
  • (2015) The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge Press)
  • (2018) Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (Pelican)
  • (2018) The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, ed. B. Keith Putt (Indiana University Press)
  • (2019) Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Indiana University Press)
  • (2020) In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (Fordham University Press)
  • (2021) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 3 [1997-2000]: The Return of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 1 [1969-1985]: Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism, Thought, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2022) Specters of God: An Anatomy of Apophatic Imagination (Indiana University Press)
  • (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 2 [1986-1996]: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2023) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 4 [2001-2004]: Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2023) What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (Columbia University Press)
  • (2024) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 5 [2005-2007]: Coming Out as a Theologian, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)

See also

References

  1. ^ "John D. Caputo". Westar Institute. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  2. ^ Camilleri, René (October 18, 2009). "Reinvent the Church". Times of Malta. Retrieved August 20, 2012.
  3. ^ "John D.Caputo". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  4. ^ "Villanova University Catalog" (PDF). Villanova University.

Online writings

Interviews



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