News of Meetings

Apologies but we are still having problems moving the seminars forward.  Please consider all meetings cancelled.

We are still hoping to get something off the ground and will resume posting as soon as we can.  If you are interested please make contact through the comments. 

News of the Next Meeting

We've hit a few snags with the proposed meetings and so we have decided to cancel the Saturday 13 October 2012 meeting.  We'll post on here about the future of the other meetings as soon as possible. 

We still want to go ahead with this and so if you are interested, please leave a comment and someone will get back to you.

Saving Paradise - Resisting the Cross

Crucifixion (Photo credit: cliff1066™)

I'm reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker.  I'll possibly get around to reviewing it some day but for now here is a quote:

When Christian baptism and Eucharist affix blame for killing Christ, then the rituals function to separate the "forgiven" from the "guilty".  Christians become, by definition, those who have been absolved, and Jews and pagans become unrepentant killers.  Participating in such rituals embeds remission for the sin of killing Christ as an indelible aspect of Christian identity.  History shows that ritually enacting this understanding can fuel a deadly dynamic that separates those worthy to live from those who deserve to die.  Such rituals shape who is embraced within the saved community and who must be scapegoated or sacrificed to preserve the community's identity.  Whether and how Christians can memorialise Jesus's crucifixion without fomenting hostility to those who hold to a different faith remains a moral issue for those who participate in such rituals.  (Page 162)

This possibly summarises the argument of this book and it is an interesting idea.  It certainly accords with experience.  The track record of Christian churches across the world is not brilliant in this respect.  I've mostly believed the cross is central to Christian theology and that the paradox of a faith with an instrument of brutal torture and judicial murder at the centre of its witness has something to say about the powers and principalities. 

Alienating people...

Let us fire our first salvo and let us do it in an unashamed manner: nothing more pitiful, nothing more sorrowful, nothing more telling about the dreadful state of affairs amongst so-called progressive Christians than to listen to most of them reciting a short list of their favourite "radical" theologians and/or religious authors. My heart sinks and my ears  begin to bleed as soon as the first names are pronounced: John Dominic Crossan, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt...(if they want to add an interfaith edge to it they will also mention the ineffable Tariq Ramadan and if they are Roman Catholic it seems it has become compulsory to refer to Hans Küng). If you have read one or more books by any of these authors our Seminar for Radical Political Theology is definitely meant for you!!! It will help you discover the difference between liberal and radical theology and might even set you in the path to become the person you have spent years telling your friends you are: a radical Christian!!!

I remember having read as a teenager in a work either by Seneca or Marcus Aurelius that a philosopher had only two options regarding his fellow human beings: to educate them or to suffer them. Well, the suffering has become unbearable so we have decided it is time to reclaim the label "radical" from the misuse it has been subject to by our trendy liberal friends and we are making no prisoners. If you hadn't heard of Thomas J.J. Altizer, William Hamilton, Harvey Cox, Dorothee Sölle, Jon Sobrino, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Hugo Assmann, Leonardo Boff, Cornel West, Ernst Bloch, James H. Cone you had an excuse to  waste your precious time reading Spong and thinking you are a radical. But it is our aim to make sure that you cannot carry on doing that with a clear conscience...This Seminar is a challenge as much as an invitation. We are in a time of crisis and liberal theology has never delivered the goods in similar situations in the past, so let us be radical once again. Ubi Spes, ibi Deus.
Post by David Mieres

Seminar Meetings

The meetings are all second Saturdays and the first three are at the corner shop at or near 86 Spital Hill.

Tranche One:

13 October 2012

10 November 2012

08 December 2012

Tranche Two:

12 January 2013

09 February 2013

09 March 2013

The first 3 meetings will run from 12 noon to 3pm with the following basic format:

12.00     Lunch

12.30     Introduction and main speaker

1.15        Response

1.30        Cup of tea and informal conversation

2.00        Discussion / groups

3.00        Finish

The fourth to the sixth meetings will most likely have a different format.  By then it should be clearer who is committed to the seminar and the meetings might focus more on working on specific projects. 

This information will be re-posted at intervals and whenever there is more information to share, eg the names of the speakers.  The speaker will be asked to post on this site about 2 weeks before the seminar and the person preparing the response will be contacted.  Further material will be posted following the seminar meeting.

If you are interested in attending any of these meetings, please leave a message as a comment so that we know to expect you and prepare enough lunch.

We will be exploring the possibility of a summer seminar perhaps in May or June 2013.

Introducing Radical Political Theology

During the last decade the dominant post-modern forms of philosophy have been partially overturned.  The limitations of the linguistic turn and the emphasis on the ‘Other’ have been exposed by a small group of, mostly, continental philosophers. These include, on the one hand, members of the ‘speculative realist’ project such as Graham Harman, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux who argue for a return to realist philosophy prior to Kant and, most significantly for this seminar, the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and others whose destruction of postmodern philosophy,  deconstruction of liberal politics and engagement with the Christian religion on a materialist basis may provide us with a platform on which to build a radical political theology.   

This seminar is not a consequence of the postmodernist construct known as the ‘return of religion’, and so does not set out to engage with Public or recent developments in ‘Political Theology’ as such (although a recent conference at the University of Chester hosted by the Centre for Faiths and Public Policy explored the possible outcomes of a meeting between Speculative Philosophy, public policy and Christian practice, the  results of which are published in Political Theology Vol 13 No. 2 (2012)).

Nor do we wish to pursue the debates developed by the coming together of Anglicanism and postmodernist philosophy known as ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ which insists on the primacy of the traditional Christian narrative and seeks to revive the imperial politics of ‘Christendom’.

We do hope to engage with the many disciplines of Contextual Theology and the new debates within Liberation Theology to help formulate a practical politico-theological response to some of the more esoteric debates briefly outlined above. 

In this seminar, we aim to explore the interface between the universal, radical, emancipatory project (however one wishes to name it), the new philosophy and elements of the Christian religion.  Consequently, we invite participants to make contributions outside the thought-framework of liberalism, the nation-state, the capitalist imperium or conservative theocracy - the predominant ideologies of our time - and assist in the project of developing a radical Christian political theology that will usefully challenge them.   

Post by James Bullock