The Logic of Incarnation: James K. A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion

by Neal DeRoo (Editor), Brian Lightbody (Editor), James K. A. Smith (Preface by)

Overview

With his Logic of Incarnation, James K. A. Smith has provided a compelling critique of the universalizing tendencies in some strands of postmodern philosophy of religion. A truly postmodern account of religion must take seriously the preference for particularity first evidenced in the Christian account of the incarnation of God. Moving beyond the urge to universalize, which characterizes modern thought, Smith argues that it is only by taking seriously particular differences--historical, religious, and doctrinal--that we can be authentically religious and authentically postmodern. Smith remains hugely influential in both academic discourse and church movements. This book is the first organized attempt to bring both of these aspects of Smith's work into conversation with each other and with him. With articles from an internationally respected group of philosophers, theologians, pastors, and laypeople, the entire range of Smith's considerable influence is represented here. Discussing questions of embodiment, eschatology, inter-religious dialogue, dogma, and difference, this book opens all the most relevant issues in postmodern religious life to a unique and penetrating critique.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630877385
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	01/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Neal DeRoo is Teaching Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Boston College. He is the co-editor of Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (forthcoming, 2008).

Brian Lightbody is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Brock University. His main research interests are in Nietzsche and Foucault. He is currently working on a book entitled: One World Only: Nietzsche, Davidson, and the Rejection of the Two-World Hypothesis.
Brian Lightbody is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, located in Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on such diverse thinkers as Foucault, Nietzsche, Haack, Marcuse, and Husserl, in addition to three monographs: Philosophical Genealogy: An Epistemological Reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault's Genealogical Method (2 vols.) and The Problem of Naturalism: Analytic Perspectives, Continental Virtues.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

About the Contributors ix

Abbreviations xii

Introduction Neal DeRoo xv

Part 1 Critiquing Postmodernism

1 The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism James K. A. Smith 3

Part 2 Receiving the (Postmodern) Tradition

2 Determined to Reveal: Determination and Revelation in Derrida Neal DeRoo 41

3 On Universality and Christian Particularism in a Postmodern Trio: James K. A. Smith, Jacques Derrida, and Soren Kierkegaard Leo Stan 57

4 Undecidability and Indecidability: Does Derrida's Ethics depend on Levinas's notion of the Third? Brian Lighbody 71

5 Tasting the Inscape of Haecceity with Hopkins, the Franciscan Philosophers, Nietzsche, and Derrida Marko Zlomislic 84

6 Defending a Universalizable Culture of Particularities (With and Against James K. A. Smith) Mehdi Wolf 99

Part 3 Applying the Critique

7 Deconstructing Institutions: Derrida and the "Emerging Church" Peter Schuurman 111

8 All (For) Giving: The Gift or Preaching (Forgiveness) Backwards James Vanderberg 120

9 Saving the Whale or Dancing with Dolphins? Andre Basson 128

10 Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Tim Horton's: Experiencing the Modern and the Post-modern in Canada Stan Skrzeszewski 139

Part 4 Critiquing the Critique: Questions Moving Forward

11 Is James K. A. Smith Afraid of Postmodernity? Wendy C. Hamblet 157

12 Who's Afraid of Theology?: A Conversation with James K. A. Smith on Dogmatics as the Grammar of Christian Particularity Mark Bowald 168

13 Unlike any other Hope: The Eschatological Structure of Hope James H. Olthuis 182

14 Is the Grace that Calls Whale-Riders Back to Catholicism any more Amazingfor Smith than for Derrida and Caputo? David Goicoechea 193

Part 5 Responding

15 Continuing the Conversation James K. A. Smith 203

Editorial Reviews

"This volume brilliantly highlights the importance of Smith's logic of incarnation. It amplifies a new and indispensable voice in the postmodern debate."

--Richard Kearney

author of The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods and Monsters

"The Logic of Incarnation offers the reader a helpful overview and critical discussion of James K. A. Smith's engagement with postmodern thought based on Christianity's central mystery: God's becoming human. In critically engaging Deconstruction, the emergent church, and the role of tradition, The Logic of Incarnation introduces the reader to central themes of current thinking on religion that have especially dominated North American discussions, but it also points, particularly in Smith's concluding response to his critics, toward recovering an ancient incarnational thinking whose radical quality--reaching far beyond modernity and postmodernity--lies precisely in recovering the ecclesial and eschatological nature of Christianity."

--Jens Zimmermann

author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation

"It is as testament to James K. A. Smith's career that, even at a relatively young age (academically speaking), his work merits an interaction as robust as this book. The Logic of Incarnation will not only introduce many to Smith's important writings, but it will also spur on conversation about these very significant ideas where, indeed, theology, philosophy, and church meet."

--Tony Jones, author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

From the Publisher