Reading the book of Revelation for Today

Reading the book of Revelation for Today

by R.E. Slater

I've been struggling lately with the too common reading of the book of Revelation by unwary and unwise Christians. Last week I had provided a number of voices warning of maga's full roar into neoliberalism which has taken bloom under our past 2024 election vouchsafing the wealthy's unmitigated control of the processes of democracy. A democracy corrupted to speak for the wealthy and not for the common man as it was intended in the early days of America's founding fathers.

Which is where the book of Revelation comes in to tell of the same occurrence in chapter 5 between the "Whore of Babylon" and the consequential evil disruption of justice for the people's of the earth. Moreover, this same wilful disruption has distorted the Genesis reading of man's "dominance" over the earth unto its prophesied usury and demise as any whoring nation might do when disputing it's complicity in the lack of healing either destroyed ecosystems or innocents. Not only is neoliberalism's ugly rule abandoning just-ful public policy for all but it's same actions have been exacerbated under today's 21st century form of capitalism as it greedily devours the earth unto its own profane purposes.

Thus and thus is my process theological reading of the book of Revelation of it's dire eschatological warnings and assurance of doom if left unheeded coming fully due-and-paid under raging maga-Christianity's blithe disregard for it's own biblical scriptures along with it's severe disregard for it's own profane and culpable actions under the rule of "the man of sin" *(this man of sin could be a person, organization, society, or an iconic symbolism of all of the above such as a president, a ruling Congressional body, the church, its leaders, or a majority of society).

Ironically, maga Christians seem always to place themselves as the "innocents" in the story of Revelation but it is exactly opposite and untrue as the bible points once again to the church's evil complicity in it's own disputed uncaring inactions to democracy's perjurious fall including its own overall deaf, dumb and blind "gospels" of hate and bigotry not only upon the people's of this earth but to the very injustices waged against the earth itself (as attested to by Trumpian 2024 cabinet selections and maga's proposed Propaganda 2025).

So then, as any good-willed process theological prophet will do, I have felt impelled by the Spirit of God to again forewarn of America's cultural demise even as we leap eagerly into our own self-made destruction with both hands-and-feet willing disregarding Revelation's warnings that we have become the very people warned to not participate in the revelational Armageddon events which will bring not only our own nation, but the nations of the world, to their utter end (which war and shunned environmental policies certainly will do). It's had to understand how the "biblical evangelical church" can so easily dismiss its own lectures and teachings but here we are in the year 2024 witnessing the full outcoming of decades of downward spiraling into cultural oblivion.

How curious then that when reading of God's forewarnings in Revelation of our purposeful destruction by our own hands underlaid by blinded hearts believing incorrectly that it is the "wicked" of the world being judged and not we ourselves for our own sins created within our wicked hearts and complicite words-and-deeds. I find in our naive religious and societal responses the height of audacity that white nationalized Christians can always believe they are guiltless in the agony of of the world - especially as clearly evidenced throughout the centuries of the heathen church exacting time-and-again harm upon itself and communities in blatant disregard for Jesus' mission to love one another. How? By bringing sword and famine, storm and flood, rage and hate, hypocrisy and legalism, upon the innocents of the earth. From the dark Crusades of centuries past to maga's own ruinous actions currently underway in America's 21st Century as vicious destruction is being intentionally planned and enacted upon our foreigners, migrants, women, children, the trans-sex populations, minorities, and women's medical rights, as maga-Christianity defiantly pretends to wash it's bloody hands as Herod did of Jesus' conviction of all personal and corporate guilt in the immediate portending of injustices being wrought against humanity, land and earth. It is as if the bible the church has read ad nauseam is more an angelic foreign language mirroring our sin even as we look into that same unspeakable mirror with the hallowed-out eyes of the self-righteousness covered in overweening pride and falsified sallow agency.

Thus speaks the bible to those who would lift themselves up to rule this earth believing they are guiltless and without fault yet have become the very ones Jesus came to overthrow and teach another way of love, mercy, forgiveness, healing, and rebirth.

R.E. Slater

November 22, 2024

edited November 26, 2024

Revelation 5 (NASB = New American Standard Bible)

The Scroll with Seven Seals

5 I saw [a]in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne a [b]scroll written inside and on the back, sealed up with seven seals. 2 And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to break its seals?” 3 And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. 4 Then I began to weep greatly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. 5 And one of the elders *said to me, “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome so as to be able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”

6 And I saw [c]between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are [d]the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. 7 And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. 8 When He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each one holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the [e]saints. 9 And they *sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are You to take the scroll and to break its seals; for You were slaughtered, and You purchased people for God with Your blood from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

10 You have made them into a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign upon the earth.”

Angels Exalt the Lamb

11 Then I looked, and I heard the voices of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was [f]myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, 12 saying with a loud voice,

“Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power, wealth, wisdom, might, honor, glory, and blessing.”

13 And I heard every created thing which is in heaven, or on the earth, or under the earth, or on the sea, and all the things in them, saying,

“To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be the blessing, the honor, the glory, and the dominion forever and ever.”

14 And the four living creatures were saying, “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshiped.

 

* * * * * *

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Drawing on John's prophetic Apocalypse, theologian Catherine Keller unveils a "dreamreading" of our current global crisis—particularly the threat of climate change and ecological devastation. She shows that John's gospel is not a foretelling of future events, but a parable of our present reality, which exposes the deep spiritual roots of these threats.

[Excerpt]

The political representatives elected to protect our democratic rights and assure social stability by checking the power of transnational corporations have failed to fulfill their duties. Under the neoliberal order which has held sway since the 1970s (when declining growth, growing inequality, and rising debt put an end to the post-war alliance between capital and democracy).... - CK

* * * * * *

“Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy,

and Other Last Chances”

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by Catherine Keller

Let us first recall why Keller has chosen to “dreamread” John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation. As a process theologian, it is no surprise that she would be interested in a Biblical text. But her purpose is not merely to read John’s missive back into its 1st century CE historical context. Nor is her intent to read it as a literal prediction of a divinely determined future. Her aim, rather, is to unveil the eternal patterns of history that reverberate through John’s day into our own. Keller is dreamreading the “ancient future” of humanity, imperiled by imperial excesses and injustices then as now. She turns to Revelation as a polysemic source of dis-closure, that is, as a reminder that the future remains open-ended, its promise or peril awaiting our response to the signs of the times. Keller reads the book’s many internal contradictions as a call to liberate ourselves, through the work of shared mourning and collective uplift, from any sense of scripts already written so that we may arrive fully in the potent present, capable of facing what MLK, Jr. called the “fierce urgency of now.” The book she dreamreads remains relevant to our situation today because, with both oppressive and progressive effects, it has inspired martyrs, emperors, and enslaved alike to shape and reshape the course of civilization for millennia.

In Chapter 5, Keller interprets John’s misogynistic vision of the luxuriously adorned “Whore of Babylon” astride a seven-headed, ten-horned scarlet beast as a metaphor (or “metaforce”) expressive of the unholy matrimony of imperial power and global economy. The beast is said to turn on the “Mother of Whores,” just as imperial superpowers have been known to contradict themselves by “devouring the very flesh, resources, [and] labor, [they] live from” (111). John details the commodities that the “merchants of the earth” of his day buy and sell along their Mediterranean sea routes. These include not only wine, pearls, silk, and spices, but “human bodies and souls” (Rev. 18:11-13). Keller reminds us that “Rome two thousand years ago operated the largest market in chattel slaves on the planet,” adding the disturbing facts that “civilization as we know it is based upon the labor of unthinkable numbers of slaves,” and, even today, long after the institution has been outlawed in most nations, tens of millions of mostly women and children remain in chains, with billions more stuck in what amounts to wage slavery (114).

Keller then turns to a critique, informed by Revelation, of our insatiable neoliberal/neo-imperial capitalist political economy. In our day, as in John’s, the power of unchecked consumerism does not simply fulfill desires, it produces them—or in terms of John’s pornographic metaforce, it “seduces”: “the graphic of the great whore signifies a commodification of self, body and soul, on the part of imperial subjectsnot just their objects” (117). In other words, the power of capitalism is not simply “out there,” imposed upon us as the will of an imperial army may be. The truly insidious thing about an economy of greed is how it infects our very selves, our sense of self-worth and well-being. The engine of our economy depends upon knowing no limits, on the feeling of lack, the constant need of more income, more land, more labor, more stuff. The political representatives elected to protect our democratic rights and assure social stability by checking the power of transnational corporations have failed to fulfill their duties. Under the neoliberal order which has held sway since the 1970s (when declining growth, growing inequality, and rising debt put an end to the post-war alliance between capital and democracy), the role of the state has been coopted, so that it now “[offers] political support, tax benefits, police and military backing for the economy, which in return rewards the politicians it rides” (121). Capital cannot help itself, it commodifies everything: land, labor, politicians, and like John’s Porn Queen, even itself, undermining its own conditions of continuance.

Building on the German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streek, Keller introduces the situation in present day Western democracies as a struggle between two constituencies, the “nation state people” and the “international market people” (122). Tensions are rising as inequality reaches levels not seen since ancient Rome (Keller cites studies showing that, within the US, the ratio between the richest 100 households and the bottom 90% is about 108,000 to 1, roughly equivalent to that between a senator and a slave at the height of the Roman empire). The rise of Trump and other demagogues around the world is symptomatic of income inequality and a growing rift between “nationalists” (who are mostly white and often rural) and “globalists” (often urban and somewhat more diverse). Rather than demonize the supporters of Trump (many of whom are evangelical Christians inspired by their own, albeit more spurious readings of Revelation), Keller acknowledges the ambiguities and contradictions of our times. Trump’s presidency was itself an outcome, and perhaps signals also the ending, of American neoliberalism (126). The anger that helped lift him into office stemmed from racist animosity but also the complete lack of concern shown by (neo)liberals for many working class people as the post-war industrial economy was dismantled and its jobs sent over seas. Keller admits that John’s visions are indeed suggestive of a great battle against the global elites who profit from such outsourcing. But the contradictions intensify, as Republicans blame wildfires in the Western US on environmentalists instead of climate change, while Democrats blame Trump’s election on Russian memes instead of acknowledging the impact of global trade on the lives of those Hillary Clinton dismissed as “deplorables.” Keller also warns against conflating jet-setting cosmopolitan neoliberalism with the radically intersectional cosmopolitics that resists with equal vigor both the “aspirational fascism” of nationalists and the insatiable extractivism of globalists (124).

In the end, Keller returns to the beginning, to the “dominion” clause in the Genesis creation narrative that has stirred so much debate among environmentalists and religious scholars. It is becoming increasingly clear to anyone paying attention that “the matter of the earth will not neatly reduce to the stuff of dollar signs…Matter Strikes Back” (130). In other words, all of humanity is beginning to experience the blowback from centuries of unchecked extraction and pollution. Witness “Gaia’s Revenge,” as James Lovelock put it. All of humanity suffers from this blowback, the conspicuously consuming and technologically insulated wealthy Western peoples as well as the Global South, where billions of people are eager for justice to be restored despite being first in line to face rising sea levels and changing climates.

The drive to dominate the Earth among the Biblical peoples has deep roots in a perhaps partial reading of the story of creation: “What a beastly irony: somehow human-godlikeness got taken as ‘go for it, godly world masters: use up the earth, waste its creatures” (131). Keller closes chapter five by offering a re-reading of the first book, reminding that Elohim creates not from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) but from “the deep” (creatio ex profundis). Further, God says that every creature, and creation itself, is good, indicating to Keller that we who are made in God’s image “are called to emulate that love of the material universe” (131). (For more on Keller’s theopoetic reading of Genesis, be sure to check out her book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming).

In Chapter 6, Keller explores the “poetics of Hebrew hope” that shaped John’s 1st century religious context and that have continued to reverberate through the millennia. The earliest Christian communities suffered disappointment after their messiah was crucified by the empire they so despised. They waited for a second coming, but Keller points out that no such “coming again” is mentioned in the Bible. Rather, despite the persistence of imperial rule and the increasingly violent persecution of his followers, Christ is signaled as “present” (parousia) rather than still to come (135). Keller goes on to chronicle the uses and abuses of Revelation. In the 2nd century CE, the African theologian Tertullian, emboldened by John’s text, attempted to create some breathing room between politics and religion by calling upon Rome to protect religious freedom (144). Eventually, Emperor Constantine would answer this call, but only at the cost of the imperialization of Christianity. The anti-imperialist egalitarian community Jesus had inspired thus transformed into the official religion of Rome. Still, Tertullian’s call would ring true thousands of years later, inspiring the liberation of slaves in the Americas. In the 11th century CE, Pope Urban II’s holy crusades, inspired by the bloody battles of John’s visions, unified a war torn Europe against a common Muslim enemy. A century later, European Christendom would face internal dissensions again, as heterodox communities perceived the growing wealth of the Vatican through the lens of John’s Great Whore (149). The monk Joachim of Fiore declared the coming “Age of Spirit” when the Church hierarchy would be dissolved, all property would be held in common, and everyone would have direct access to the divine. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the doors of All Saint’s Church in Wittenberg, thus initiating the Protestant revolt against the excesses of the Catholic Church. Luther memed scenes from John’s Revelation by portraying the Pope as the Whore of Babylon. Included in his German translation of the Bible was a drawing of the Mother of Whores wearing the papal tiara (151). The Thirty Years War to follow was the bloodiest in European history. Colored version of the Whore of Babylon illustration from Martin Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible

Keller chronicles these events to make clear that “the history of collective resistance to oppression is no less an effect of the Apocalypse than is the oppression itself” (155). Indeed, Jewish messianism leaves its traces in all modern progressive movements on behalf of justice. Keller says that the progressive left must grieve the “totalitarian traumatisms” and “messianic disappointment” of 20th century state communism, turning elsewhere for its (more intersectional, more cosmopolitical and multispecies) political projects (158). While the right appears more unified, and thus more poised to take power, it is “precisely because of its pluralist and planetary proclivities [that] the progressive spectrum is more vulnerable than the right to contradictions between its ever-apocalyptic priorities” (161). She councils our “cosmically entangled, dangerously gifted, achingly diverse” species to take time for griefwork, to mourn all that has been and is being lost. And she warns us to remain ever vigilant against the temptation to allow the rage that arises in us to forego its righteousness by collapsing into a vengeful “we-good, you-bad” dichotomy. The split between good and evil people only fuels more cycles of revenge. If God is love (as the other John said in his gospel), and if justice is what love looks like in public (as Cornel West puts it), then only our love of each other (enemies included) and of all creation can hold open the possibility of a future worth living in. What kind of future will that be? In the final chapters of her book, Keller offers some possibilities…

Matthew Segall

July 11, 2021

The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think

A painting entitled, “The Landing of Columbus,” by Albert Bobbett (1877) of Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas. Sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Italian navigator and colonist Columbus set out to discover a westward route to Asia. He landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, claiming it for Spain. The priests who accompanied him forcibly converted large numbers of the indigenous population to Christianity. |  The Print Collector—Getty Images

The Roots of Christian Nationalism

Go Back Further Than You Think

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by Robert P. Jones

August 31, 2023 7:00 AM EDT

Jones is the president and founder of PRRI and the New York Times bestselling author of the The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future as well as White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He writes a weekly newsletter at https://www.whitetoolong.net/.

Across the last few decades in the U.S., we have experienced widespread debates and even violent conflicts over American history. Battles like these typically erupt during times of social change, when cultural convulsions shake the foundations of old ways of knowing and living. Identity, rather than policy, drives divisions. History becomes the new front line in the culture wars, as claims about who we are as a nation inevitably turn on competing narratives about when and how we arrived at this place.

The term “white Christian nationalism” has recently emerged in the social sciences and the media as a way of describing the worldview that has burst onto the public stage with Trumpism and the “Make America Great Again” movement. The toxic blend of ethno-religious identity politics was reflected in the prayers and religious symbols participants carried at the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and it has become central to the trajectory of the contemporary Republican Party, two thirds of whom identify as white and Christian.

But if we see these recent trends against the long backdrop of western history, we can see that the phenomenon this term describes has far deeper roots than the post-Obama MAGA backlash. Our two political parties are increasingly animated by two starkly conflicting moral visions that have struggled for ascendancy since the first Europeans landed on these shores five centuries ago. Is America a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians, or is America a pluralistic democracy where all stand on equal footing as citizens? Most Americans embrace the latter vision. But a desperate, defensive, mostly white Christian minority continue to cling to the former.

To fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493—not the year Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” but the year in which he returned to a hero’s welcome in Spain, bringing with him gold, brightly colored parrots, and nearly a dozen captive Indigenous people. It was also the year he was commissioned to return to the Americas with a much larger fleet of 17 ships, nearly 1,500 men, and more than a dozen priests to speed the conversion of Indigenous people who inhabited what he, along with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, still believed were Asian shores.

The return of Columbus in 1493 also precipitated one of the most fateful but unacknowledged theological developments in the history of the western Christian Church: the creation of what has come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Established in a series of 15th-century papal bulls (official edicts that carry the full weight of church and papal authority), the Doctrine claims that European civilization and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races, and religions. From this premise, it follows that domination and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving, if not the temporal, then the eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no earthly atrocities could possibly tilt the scales of justice against these immeasurable goods.

The Doctrine of Discovery merged the interests of European imperialism, including the African slave trade, with Christian missionary zeal. Dum Diversas, the initial edict that laid the theological and political foundations for the Doctrine, was issued by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452. It explicitly granted Portuguese king Alfonso V the following rights:

“To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

This papal decree, and others that extended and developed its principles, provided the moral and religious justification for an unfettered European colonial race for “undiscovered lands” and fertilized the blossoming African slave trade. The most relevant papal edict for the American context was the bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in May 1493, with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership rights of lands in the Americas following the voyages of Columbus the year before. It praised Columbus and again affirmed the church’s blessing of and interest in political conquest, “that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”

While the Doctrine of Discovery has escaped scrutiny by most white scholars and theologians, Indigenous people and scholars of color have long been testifying to these Christian roots of white supremacy, while dying from and living with their damaging effects. Indigenous scholars such as the late Vine Deloria Jr. (Lakota, Standing Rock Sioux), Robert J. Miller (Eastern Shawnee of Oklahoma), and Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) have been highlighting, for over 50 years now, the centrality of this critical theological and political turn.

As I’ve continued my own reeducation journey over the last 10 years, I have come to consider the Doctrine of Discovery as a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the deep structure of the European political and religious worldviews we have inherited in this country. The Doctrine of Discovery furnished the foundational lie that America was “discovered” and enshrined the noble innocence of “pioneers” in the story we, white Christian Americans, have told about ourselves. Ideas such as Manifest Destiny, America as a city on a hill, or America as a new Zion all sprouted from the seed that was planted in 1493. This sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian chosenness, has shaped the worldview of most white Americans and thereby influenced key events, policies, and laws throughout American history.

Courtesy of Simon & Schuster/ Robert P. Jones

The contemporary currency of this worldview is reflected in the telling results of a 2023 Christian Nationalism Survey, conducted by PRRI in partnership with the Brookings Institution: Do you agree or disagree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The survey found that while only 3 in 10 Americans agreed with this statement, majorities of Republicans (52%) and white evangelical Protestants (56%) affirmed it.

Moreover, the survey found that among white Americans today, this belief in America as a divinely ordained white Christian nation—one that has blessed so much brutality in our history—is strongly linked to denials of structural racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, support for patriarchal gender roles, and even support for political violence.

The contemporary white Christian nationalist movement flows directly from a cultural stream that has run through this continent since the first Europeans arrived five centuries ago. The photographs of the insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, bear an uncanny resemblance to the painting of Hernando de Soto marshaling Christian symbols to claim Indigenous lands for Spain on May 8, 1541, which still hangs prominently in the Rotunda of that same building. On the Capitol steps, a massive wooden cross was erected, standards emblazoned with the name of Jesus were flown, and Biblical passages were read. Hands were raised in both prayer and violence. Seen in this light, the symbols brandished by the insurrectionists were not incidental; they were the centuries-old ritual implements of the Doctrine of Discovery, summoned to do the work they have always done.

Our current conflicts and contradictions are clear signs that we are experiencing a significant new moment in our nation’s history. If we are to get our collective bearings, we must be able to see that the histories of oppression in our country flow from the same source. The compartmentalization of history focused on the plight of specific oppressed groups—the genocide and displacement of Native Americans or the enslavement and lynching of African Americans—has some advantages for specific people groups, insofar as it centers their struggle for justice. But the real beneficiaries of such siloed history are white Christian people. These stories, told in isolation, fracture the historical gaze among the victims of violence, theft, slavery, and oppression. Even well-intentioned accounts, told in this way, encourage a partial reckoning. These fragmented narratives demarcate America’s so-called “Indian problem” and so-called “Negro problem”—as even well-meaning whites historically referred to them—as distant islands, neither one visible from the shores of the other. But if we do the hard work of pushing upriver, we find, at the headwaters, the "white Christian problem".

In many ways, this truth has always been glaringly apparent. But for those of us who are white and Christian, our precarious position has historically required that we remain vigilantly ignorant of our own origin story while demanding the acquiescence of others in this conspiracy. Every map of every U.S. state is a living witness to our massive land theft and occupation. Yet, up until very recently, history books have been full of the lies necessary to defend an impossibly innocent and glorious past. The crimes were so monstrous and the evidence so near at hand that we desperately built theologies, philosophies, and entire cultural worlds designed to obscure the facts and to produce, propagate, and protect these mythic origins. This worldview washed over our churches and seeped into our sermons, liturgies, and hymnals. It created its own grammar that renders the most clarion testimonies of our accusers silent. Euphemisms like “explorer,” “pioneer,” and “homesteader” created a respectable veneer that smoothed over the jagged valence of terms like “invader,” “occupier,” and “colonizer.” The ubiquitous use of the passive voice in our histories protected responsible subjects. We were so successful in masking the truth that even one of our most enlightened artists could sing to us, without a pang of conscience, “This Land Is Your Land.”

Here is the question that must illuminate the path forward for us and our children: How can we meaningfully respond to being beneficiaries of a crime so plain it cannot be denied, and so large it can never be fully righted?

Indeed, the challenge before us is formidable. To account for the lives, land, and labor that have been stolen, we will need to relinquish the ethno-religious hierarchies embedded in the Doctrine of Discovery. And we’ll need a moral imagination that is not amnesic, one that will hold on to the memory of the systemic injustices that have accrued to Black and Indigenous people and their forebears.

We’ll also need to expand our vocabulary. For example, while reparations may be the right term to describe what justice looks like for African Americans who are descendants of enslaved people and who have experienced generations of disenfranchisement by discriminatory U.S. laws, this term may not capture what Native Americans want and deserve. Here, restitution may be a more apt response. As the American Indian Movement and more recently the #LandBack movement have insisted, at root, justice toward Native Americans cannot be met simply with monetary payments; it must be worked out in the context of honoring the promises in U.S. government treaties regarding land and sovereignty.

We white Christians no longer represent the majority of Americans. We are no longer capable of setting the nation’s course by sheer cultural and political dominance. But there are still more than enough of us to decisively derail the future of democracy in America. If we wish to do otherwise, we can no longer disingenuously pretend that democracy and the Doctrine of Discovery are, or ever were, compatible. We can no longer pay tribute to one while benefiting from the other. We must choose. And if we choose democracy, it will require more than just confession by an unflinching few. It will require joining the work already underway to repair the damage done by this malignant cultural legacy. Through that transformative engagement, we might finally illuminate the path that leads to a shared American future.

*Excerpt adapted from The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones, published by Simon & Schuster on September 5, 2023. Copyright © 2023 by Robert P. Jones. 

 

More From TIME:

• It’s Time to Stop Giving Christianity a Pass on White Supremacy and Violence

• How Oklahoma Became Ground Zero in the War Over Church-State Separation

 

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

John D. Caputo

Usually I try to give a short intro to a subject matter but time is pressing at the moment. In short, Dr. Caputo and I have travelled different roads but have gotten to the same point spiritually. For myself, I came by the highways of Process Theology (Whitehead) via Continental Thought. For John, he came by way of progressive Catholicism which finds him in the Radical (religious) and Continental theology side of things. It would not be coincidental that we have each needed to deconstruct our past in order to get where we are today.

I have many of Dr. Caputo's books and am recommending the current new series of five volumes below which summarize his thinking over these many years. My first meeting with John was when hosting him and Peter Rollins for a week via my computer per GCAS' request (sic, Creston Davis) many years ago. I've stayed aware of John's work ever since then; and regarding Pete, I met him personally and have listened to him many times via Rob Bell and Mars Hill, and Pete's own network. If memory serves correctly, I believe Pete is a protege of John's.

All for now. Enjoy!

R.E. Slater

November 14, 2024

Bio - John D. Caputo

https://artsandsciences.syracuse.edu/people/faculty/caputo-john-d/

Research and Teaching Interests

John D. Caputo is a hybrid philosopher/theologian intent on producing impure thoughts, thoughts which circulate between philosophy and theology, short-circuits which deny fixed and rigorous boundaries between philosophy and theology. Caputo treats "sacred" texts as a poetics of the human condition, or as a "theo-poetics," a poetics of the event harbored in the name of God. His past books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, The Weakness of God. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and has an interest in interacting with the working church groups like ikon and the “Emergent” Church. He is currently working in a book on our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled The Fate of All Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II.

Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, working on approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and also the presence in continental philosophy of radical religious and theological motifs. He has special interests in the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion and others); the critique of onto-theology; the question of post-modernism as "post-secularism;" the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with St. Augustine; the recent interest shown by philosophers in St. Paul; the link between Kierkegaard and deconstruction; Heidegger's early theological writings on Paul and Augustine; “secular” and “death of God” theology (Altizer, Vattimo, Zizek); medieval metaphysics and mysticism.

He conducts a series of biennial conferences on these themes: April, 2005, "St. Paul Among the Philosophers" (now available from Indiana University Press); April, 2007: "Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion" (in press with Indiana University Press); April, 2009: "The Politics of Love" (in preparation. The final conference, “The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion,” was held April 7-9, 2011.

Recently, three books have appeared about his work: Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo, Eds. Neal Deroo and Marko Zlomsic (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010); A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed.Mark Dooley (SUNY Press, 2002) andReligion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, ed. Ed. James Olthius (Routledge, 2002). Prof. Caputo joined the department in Fall, 2004 after retiring from Villanova University where he taught from 1968 to 2004.

Professor Caputo's The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana, 2006) received the 2007 AAR Book Award for "Constructive-Reflective Studies in Religion.” What Would Jesus Deconstruct? was the winner of the ForeWord Magazine Best Philosophy Book of 2007 award.

Prof. Caputo retired at the end of the 2010-11 academic year.

Education

Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College (1968)

M.A., Villanova University (1964)

BA, LaSalle University (1962)

Career

Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities, Syracuse University, 2004 - present

David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Villanova University, 2004 – present

David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University, 1968-2004

Visiting Professor, New School for Social Research, Spring, 1994

Distinguished Adjunct Professor, Fordham University Graduate Program, 1985-88

Visiting Professor, Fordham University, Fall, 1980

Visiting Professor, Duquesne University, Fall, 1978

Instructor, St. Joseph's University (Philadelphia, 1965-68)

Is God Talk Necessary?

with John D. Caputo (Part 1)

interview link

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.

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5 Volume Summation Series

by John D. Caputo

Book 1 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers: Volume 1: 1969–1985 Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism, Thought

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

Book 2 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological PapersVolume 2: 1986–1996: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)

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.

Book 3 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers: Volume 3. 1997–2000: The Return of Religion, by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)

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.

Book 4 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Paper: Volume 4: 2001-2004: Continental Philosophy of Religion, by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)

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.

Book 5 of 5: John D. Caputo: The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers: Volume 5: 2005–2007: Coming Out as a Theologian, by by John Caputo (Author), Eric Weislogel (Editor)

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

Questioning God (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (Pelican Books)

What to Believe?: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology

The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional

More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Studies in Continental Thought)



Truth: Philosophy in Transit

Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination

God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought

On Religion

After the Death of God (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)

Demythologizing Heidegger (Philosophy of Religion)

Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics

St. Paul among the Philosophers (Philosophy of Religion)

It Spooks: Living in response to an unheard call

The Religious

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John D. Caputo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John D. Caputo
Born	John David Caputo October 26, 1940 (age 84) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Alma mater	La Salle University (BA) Villanova University (MA) Bryn Mawr College (PhD)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy phenomenology postmodern Christianity
Institutions	Villanova University Syracuse University
Doctoral students	James K. A. Smith
Other notable students	Theodore George
Main interests	Hermeneutics ethics mysticism theology deconstruction
Notable ideas	Weak theology radical hermeneutics
Website	https://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

• Theodore George
• Michael Brogan
• James K. A. Smith, professor, philosopher and theologian
• Nythamar de Oliveira, professor, philosopher and theologian

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

• Khôra
• List of American philosophers
• List of deconstructionists

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.

External links

Online writings

• John D. Caputo at philpapers.org
• "After Jacques Derrida Comes the Future" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 27, 2007), by John D. Caputo
• "For Love of the Things Themselves: Derrida’s Hyper-Realism" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 27, 2007), by John D. Caputo
• "Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
• "Scripture: A Prologue" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
• "Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Unconditionality, the Coming God and Derrida's Democracy to Come" (pdf), by John D. Caputo
• "Theopoetic/theopolitic" (pdf) John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller
  'Cross Currents; Winter 2007; V. 57, No. 1'

Interviews

• Interview with Carl Raschke
• Interview at The Modern World
• After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion, Part 2 by David Cayley, Ideas, broadcast 1 May 2012

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article link

Opinionator

A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web

 

The Stone

Looking ‘White’ In the Face

By George Yancy and John D. Caputo

 July 2, 2015

This is the 13th in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with John D. Caputo, who is the Thomas J. Watson professor of religion emeritus at Syracuse University and David R. Cook professor of philosophy emeritus at Villanova University. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps” and “Truth.” His next book, “Hoping Against Hope,” will appear this fall. — George Yancy

George Yancy: I’d like to begin with an observation — maybe an obvious one — that the task of engaging race or whiteness in philosophy has been taken up almost exclusively by nonwhite philosophers. My sense is that this is partly because whiteness is a site of privilege that makes it invisible to many white philosophers. I also think that some white philosophers would rather avoid thinking about how their own whiteness raises deeper philosophical questions about identity, power and hegemony, as this raises the question of personal responsibility. I have found that it is often very difficult to convince white philosophers that they should also take up this project in their work — they tend to avoid it, or don’t consider it philosophically relevant. Do you agree?

Stop us and ask, ‘To what extent is everything you just said a function of being white?’

John D. Caputo: “White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

Photo

John D. Caputo

Credit

 Carlos Vergara

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

G.Y.: Do you think that this avoidance of race among white philosophers is rooted in fear?

J.D.C.: I think that racism arises from a profound fear of the other, and fear is not far from hatred. But my experience is that most philosophers, most academics, are quite progressive in their thinking about race and sexuality and politics generally and they are often active in progressive causes. My guess is that if they don’t write professionally about racism — I suspect it is often part of their teaching — it is in part because of a certain thoughtlessness, like my “Nordo-centrism.” I am not afraid of the Southern Hemisphere; it just didn’t hit me that this expression assumes “we” all live in the Northern one!

But I also think we have to take account of the professionalization and corporatization of the university, where our livelihood depends upon becoming furiously specialized technicians who publish in very narrow areas. Racism — like sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious discrimination, mistreatment of animals, environmental destruction, economic inequality — is a complex problem. All these problems demand to be addressed responsibly, and that requires expertise, a command of the literature, a knowledge of history, etc. No one can do all that, especially people trying to find jobs and later on get tenure and promotion, unless it intersects with their specialty in some pertinent way.

We all learned from Hannah Arendt a long time ago about the long arm of thoughtlessness, which she ventured to say reaches as far as the death camps.

It is usually the damage done by religious dogmatism that occupies my attention. So I am at least as guilty as other white philosophers. My own work has always involved theorizing the “other,” the claim made upon us by those who are excluded by the prevailing system, so I am always on the verge of mentioning race and even have race and other powers of exclusion in mind.

My shortcoming is that I lack the expertise to get down in the dirt with most of these problems; the advantage is that my work has a suggestiveness to a lot of people on the front lines in different life-situations, who grasp its application and tell me it helps them with their work.

G.Y.: Given that you claim above that white philosophers can not responsibly ignore the subject of race, what do you think must be done to get them — and the ways they understand philosophy — to change?

J.D.C.: More often than not I do not analyze race explicitly unless I am asked to; it’s only then I find there are new things for me to say. I guess that means that one solution is to do what you’re doing now — ask us! Interrupt us. Stop us and ask, “To what extent is everything you just said a function of being white?” There’s a fair chance we never asked ourselves that question. And get the courses that do raise this question into the curriculum.

G.Y.: You mentioned that most philosophers and most academics are quite progressive, but often slip into a kind of unintentional thoughtlessness. Still, the recipients of such thoughtlessness can suffer deeply. And even “progressives” can continue to perpetuate deep systemic forms of discrimination in problematic ways. Do you think that thoughtlessness can function as an “excuse” for not engaging more rigorously in combating various structures of systemic power?

J.D.C.:   No doubt. We all learned from Hannah Arendt a long time ago about the long arm of thoughtlessness, which she ventured to say reaches as far as the death camps. Every time I am asked to say something about race — or the environment or sexism or these other issues we’ve mentioned — I feel like Augustine in the “Confessions” praying and weeping over his sins. In these matters I follow Levinas. When he analyzes ethics as an asymmetric relationship to the other — that means the other overtakes us, lays claim to us with or without our consent — he says a good conscience is fraudulent. This means our responsibility never ends and we can never say it has been discharged. It is when we think that things are fine that we are not thinking. It’s just when we say “peace, peace” that the lack of peace descends on us. We coast on the status quo and we need the unrelenting provocation of responsible intellectuals, artists, journalists and the media to remind us of our complacency about the suffering that is all around us.

G.Y.: You’ve argued that true religion or prophetic religion engages the real, involves a process of risk, especially as it demands, as you’ve said, serving those who have been oppressed, marginalized, orphaned. Etymologically, religion comes from “religare,” which means to “bind fast.” I wonder if that process of binding fast is with those who are the strangers, the orphans, the unarmed black men recently killed by police, women who are sexually objectified, the poor, etc.

The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty.

J.D.C.: Yes, it is, of course. In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it.

That has been felt in a particularly cruel way among black men and women and children, where poverty is the most entrenched and life is the most desperate. The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other.

To be sure, younger evangelicals are becoming critical of their elders on this point, and I am trying to reach them in my own work, and there are also many examples of prophetic religion, like the Catholic parish in a North Philadelphia ghetto that I wrote about in “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.

G.Y.: You raise a few important issues here. I wonder what it would look like for a white police officer to see an unarmed black man/boy through the eyes of prophetic religion. On an international stage, I imagine that both Palestinians and Jews would begin to see one another differently, where each would feel the deep ethical weight of the other.

J.D.C.: Prophetic does not mean the ability to foretell the future. It means the call for justice for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger,” the affirmation that the mark of God is on the face of everyone who is down and out, and a prophetic sensibility requires walking a mile in the shoes of the other.

I remember years ago, the president of a local college (in the Quaker tradition) took a year’s leave of absence to work as a trash collector. I think you are hitting on an irreducible element in the phenomenology of “alterity,” the very nub of it: Were I there, there would be “here.” That is a simple thought whose depth we never plumb. In my own work I cite it frequently to criticize the idea of “the one true religion.” We have seven grandchildren and when the last one was born I remember thinking that a little black child was also being born that day, as dear and innocent as our granddaughter, who was going home to a desperate situation where the odds will be stacked against her. We begin with an originary natal equality and then we crush it. “Switched at birth” stories, like Mark Twain’s “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” have a deep ethical and political import. Were I there, there would be here. That should transform everything.

G.Y.: On June 17, 2015, a white male shot and killed nine people in the historic African-American Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Baptist Church in Charleston, S.C. There was no apparent capacity on the part of this white male to walk in the shoes of the other, to envision black life as anything other than disposable.

At a certain point in my career I decided to let my heart have a word.

J.D.C.: Exactly. This was a white man declaring these lives not merely worthless but, still worse, a threat to the “natural order” — what form of oppression does not hide behind the “natural order?” — of the supremacy of the so-called white race. There is a qualitative difference here. This was not the result of a split-second miscalculation or a misunderstanding by a policeman in a tense situation. This was a ruthless execution. Here the other does not overtake me but lies beneath me, contemptible and abject. This is pure hatred of the other.

G.Y.: Staying on the theme of walking in the shoes of the other, can you speak to the recent revelation regarding Rachel Dolezal passing as black? Do you see this as a genuine dwelling with the other or as a form of appropriation?

J.D.C.: I can only assume her intentions were good but I think she was misguided. You can’t be an “intentional” victim, adopt it freely, because that means you are always free to walk away from it if the going gets rough, take a few weeks off for a holiday, or just you change your mind. So it ends up making a mockery of the oppressed — the biting edge of oppression is that is not of your own choosing! People who try to walk a mile in the shoes of the other, to live among and dedicate their lives to working with the oppressed, are also sensitive to the fact of their own privilege. They know they can never truly identify with them. They understand this paradox but it doesn’t paralyze them. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.

G.Y.: Is there a version of philosophy that “binds us” philosophers to the real, one that requires risking our necks for the least of these?

J.D.C.: That is the attraction of postmodern philosophy to me, which is a philosophy of radical pluralism. It theorizes alterity, calls for unrelenting sensitivity to difference, and teaches us about the danger of our own power, our freedom, our “we.” I think that philosophy is not only a work of the mind but also of the heart, and it deals with ultimate matters about which we cannot be disinterested observers. So at a certain point in my career I decided to let my heart have a word, to write in a more heartfelt way, which of course is to push against the protocols of the academy. That is why I advised my graduate students, only half in jest, that it would be too risky for them to write like that, and safer to wait until they were tenured full professors!

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Furthermore, we do not merely write, we teach. Teaching means interacting in a fully embodied and engaged way with young people at a very precious moment in their life — when they are most ready to hear something different. Here philosophy professors brush up against what I consider the religious and prophetic quality of their work, even if they resist those words. Our work is a vocation before it is a form of employment.

Of course, this is possible in any philosophical style or tradition, but this is the special attraction of “Continental” philosophy for me. This style of thinking erupted in the 19th century with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who wrote with their blood, as we say, and the young Marx, and stretched from phenomenology to post-structuralism in the 20th century, and came to a head under the name of postmodernism, the affirmation of difference and plurality in a dizzying, digitalized world. This tradition speaks from the heart, speaks to the heart.

I came to philosophy through religion and theology and as a result philosophy has always had a salvific and prophetic quality for me. It has always been a way to save myself, even as in antiquity philosophy did not mean an academic specialty but a way of living wisely. This is all threatened today by the professionalization of the university, of our teaching and our writing.

G.Y.: The 20^th century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claimed that postmodernism involved a resistance toward and critical questioning of metanarratives — “big stories” like the Enlightenment, the march of scientific progress, or the supremacy of the West, that legitimate nations or cultures. I think postmodernism has tremendous value in terms of critically engaging racism. Yet metanarratives are also powerful, and resistant to being undone. Besides encouraging white people to become more thoughtful, how do we do the deeper ethical work of dwelling near one another, recognizing our shared humanity?

J.D.C.: “Emancipation” is a prophetic call that never stops calling. If we take it as a meta-narrative, then we run the danger of being lulled into a myth of progress, and we have seen how successful the right has been in reversing progress in civil rights and fair elections. But if I am dubious about meta-narratives, I am not dubious about prophetic action, which lies in singular sustained acts of resistance.

I have several times used the example of Rosa Parks. She did not one day, out of the blue, refuse to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus, nor was she even the first one to do that. What she did that day was another in a long line of acts of resistance, but this one worked. This one “linked” as Lyotard would put it. It set off a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., which was led by a young pastor no one ever heard of who ran a local church, a fellow named Martin Luther King Jr. The rest is history — a history the right would like to undo. So Rosa Parks did the right thing at the right time in the right place. She set off the “perfect storm” — for racists!

I have a hope against hope not in meta-narratives but in singular actions like that. Singular, but consistent and resolute.

G.Y.: Lastly, do you think that we need more prophetic voices in the world? What sort of Bildung or educational cultivation might help to generate more prophetic voices as opposed to those voices that appear to be seduced by power and narrow thinking?

J.D.C.: The prophetic voices are often the voices of obscure people who have no idea they’re prophets, who produce changes they never dreamed possible. So massive changes, structural changes, tend to be a function of mini-changes, singular deeds of singular people. We require a massive change in a culture of greed and selfishness, where the concept of the “common good” is moribund, never even mentioned.

One place this change should be focused is the children, investing in the schools, lifting up a generation of desperately disadvantaged children in the ghettos, which I think is the best shot we have to break the cycle of poverty. There is no better place to experience the prophetic call of the other than in the face of a child in need, no better way to “dwell near” the other, as you put it.

Right now, with electoral districts gerrymandered against the poor, and with the unchecked flow of right wing wealth into political campaigns, the electoral process that is supposed to address these problems has been profoundly distorted and corrupted. Right now, I fear it will take a generation to correct that. But the whole idea of prophetic action is that it is precisely when we are sure that things can never be changed that a woman refuses to sit in the back of the bus and the whole world changes. I also have hope in contemporary systems of communication. If we can keep them open, otherwise invisible individual acts of resistance — and oppression — become visible. That will keep the future open. That is our hope against hope.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Peter Singer and others) can be found here.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.