A Response to the Conference

Abstract

The question discussed in this article is whether Christian theology should influence contemporary political debates. The topic is discussed through two practical case studies: (1) technological advances in genetic engineering and (2) the just war tradition and the use of force. In the first discussion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's unfinished Ethics is employed to demonstrate the importance of substantial theological categories to resist a reductionist technological utilitarian discourse about the body. Intrinsic human dignity is essentially God-given. In the second, Aquinas and Augustine add theological complexity and substance to secular discussions of war and peace. Human caring is more than the protection of the sovereign state. A peace that is only the absence of war can disguise many harmful situations. In conclusion, theological discussion brings nuance, richness and depth to secular political debates so long as theologians go beyond simplistic contributions such as ‘God demands’ or ‘The Bible forbids’.     

"You turn if you want to": The Questions a Pragmatic Political Theology Might Ask of Speculative Realism

Abstract

The question pursued in this article is what might a pragmatic (in the Rortyan sense) political theology ask speculative realists to contribute to its analyses and discussions. The article begins by discussing the potential reservations political theologians might have in employing Richard Rorty as a dialogue partner. It then considers the insights from Rorty that political theologians might value, namely a respect for Western democracy and pluralism, the desire to reform capitalism, and a deeper understanding of the relationship between Christianity and liberalism. These insights are discussed in dialogue with the radical orthodoxy of John Milbank. It is argued that Milbank and Rorty share post-foundational philosophical assumptions but arrive at different political conclusions with regard to democracy and capitalism. The paper makes the case for a pragmatic valuing of democracy and capitalism and a recognition of their Christian heritage.     

Liberalism and nationalism in Russia. Boris Chicherin as a modernist nationalist

This article investigates the link between nationalism and liberalism in Russia by looking at the way the leading spokesman of early Russian liberalism, Boris Chicherin, combined liberal ideas with notions of nation‐building and the idea of the nation as a modernising phenomenon. The article argues that the young Chicherin, at least in the formative years of the 1850s, had an instrumental approach to liberalism. Liberalism served a specific purpose – to integrate the people and shape a community of active citizens so that Russia could modernise. Chicherin was concerned with the formation of a modern nation‐state rather than the establishment of popular rule or political rights. In this sense, his thinking fits well into what, in the context of the Ottoman Empire, has been called modernist nationalism.     

梁启超：自由主义的激进与保守

梁启超对中西文化调和的态度,使五四时期的梁启超似乎成了一个文化保守主义者。其实上世纪二十年代的梁启超与晚清民初时的梁启超无论是从思想的内容还是从思想的走向来说都是一致的,梁后期的文化保守主义与其最初的自由主义是一脉相承的,而且正是其最初对于自由主义的理解决定了其晚期文化保守主义的态度。本文是第一次从梁启超的自由主义思想方面来探讨梁的激进与保守与其自由主义思想的关系。     

The Reign of Grace: Liberalism and Heresy in the New World

This article examines the controversy surrounding The Reign of Grace (1888), a pamphlet published in Dunedin by William Salmond (d. 1917), a Presbyterian intellectual. It came in for harsh criticism. James MacGregor, a conservative minister, and Adam Johnston, a layman, wrote rebutting pamphlets. The controversy occurred during a period in which Presbyterianism's leadership was dividing along liberal and traditionalist lines. It dominated proceedings at the Presbytery of Dunedin for months, featured at the 1888 Synod of Otago and Southland, and received some coverage abroad. At stake was Salmond's proposal for an extended “reign of grace” that allowed for postmortem repentance. His opponents considered this an attack on Christian mission. I discuss the controversy in terms of Salmond's views on the Bible, his challenge to the Westminster Confession, and his specific proposition for extending grace's “reign.” I argue that while the debate reflected a stark liberal–traditionalist polarisation — something seen particularly in regard to the Confession — there was something further at play. Regarding Salmond's extension of grace's reign, the debate was not between liberals and traditionalists, but between a man largely standing alone against an array of liberals and traditionalists who found his idea dangerous.     

Reproductive cancer: female autonomy and border crossing in medical discourse and fiction

Using three contemporary Irish novels: Down By the River and The Light of Evening by Edna O'Brien and My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain as well as Irish Medical Journal, I suggest that representations of female cancers are images of female pathology that reify and question disease as limitation of autonomy. Tracing the image of reproductive cancers through parts of the Irish cultural artifacts displays how both the fiction and Irish medical discourse attend disproportionately to female reproductive cancers. The texts construct female bodies as sites of pathology through textual representations of reproductive cancer and build upon Irish metaphors of landscape as female, which conceptualize women's (immobile, permeable) bodies as the site of invasion. Thus, fiction and health genres construct (and restrict) gender autonomy through two versions of border control: movement across body borders and movement across spatial, especially geopolitical, borders.     

Political Involvement and Religious Compromises

Abstract

The risks of modern politics are significant enough that religious believers ought to be making greater efforts than many of them are currently doing to think soberly about the effects of their political participation. In this article I argue that Stanley Hauerwas’s most recent approach to political participation is a promising one but that there are further measures that are equally profitable as ways of facilitating the public witness of the faithful. I develop out of my discussion of Hauerwas some participatory guidelines for religious believers. First I suggest that they ought to be abiding by a worldview integrity condition, and then I argue that they ought also to be subjecting themselves to the assessments of a critical community.     

The Political Thought of David Walsh: A Symposium

Abstract

David Walsh has published a trilogy of books on the ideological, political, and philosophical trajectories of modernity. He confronts the crisis of modernity and argues that modernity has the resources within itself to reestablish a collective commitment to the order of existence. This symposium offers four essays reflecting on and responding to Walsh's assessment of modernity and its prospects.     

Sonorous Specters: On Some Recent Histories and Economies of Afro-Latin Jazz

This essay examines the shifts and recalibrations in the Latin Americanist musical production at stake in the relation between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, institutions sharing an abiding commitment to the past but differing in how they conceive and enact time, space, and place. I identify a set of figures consistently and constantly invoked by contemporary actors to create symbolic and material economies grounded less in a tradition than in the differing relations that the living held with their specters, past, present, and future.     

Doreen Finneron and Adam Dinham (eds.), Building on Faith: Faith Buildings in Neighbourhood Renewal

Abstract

This article responds to Adam Kotsko's counter-positioning of Thomist-Milbankian hierarchy on the one hand and Deleuzian-Surinian univocity on the other as competing visions for an ontologically grounded universal socialism. Pointing to Milbank's declaration that it would be "ridiculous" to debate Christianity's universality, Rubenstein raises suspicion about the ethical and political value of universality as such. Ultimately, she points to Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of "sharing" as a means of relating existents that neither reconsolidates a static hierarchy nor abolishes transcendence. Rather, sharing "shares beings out," clearing a space for genuine debate among those who are essentially different.     

A Critique of the Metaphysics of Ontological Poesis : Responding to Theology and the Political

Abstract

A common set of metaphysical assumptions inform the theological proposals of many contributors to Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Those assumptions are orientated toward grounding the possibility of genuine ontological creativity (poesis) in a particular construal of nature's mediation of the supernatural. Applying the claims of Bernard Lonergan's early work on grace and freedom to those assumptions, the argument is made that this position repeats the most fundamental flaws of the Bañezian position in the de Auxiliis controversy: namely, a basic confusion of form with act, which gives rise to the misguided assumption that a "third" (i.e., physical premotion, causal influx, sophia) must be posited to mediate divine grace to the world and within it. It is argued that this confusion reveals that a competitive understanding of the God/world relation is presumed in this proposal, which itself is the result of a failure to affirm the absolute and immediate dependence implied by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.     

Jim Wallis,Faith Works: Lessons on Spirituality and Social Action

Abstract

This is a response to John Milbank that further unfolds our debate published as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston Davis and published by MIT Press, 2009. My response to Milbank takes its point of departure from Pascal's wager.     

19世纪英国的政治民主化与女权运动

工业化与政治民主化是19世纪英国历史的主旋律。在工业化的浪潮中,许多妇女走向社会,走进劳动力市场,成为独立的雇佣劳动,从而扩大了眼界,增强了独立意识。在社会政治民主化运动中,她们接受自由主义思想,参与党派活动、宪章运动和反谷物法斗争,甚至独立开展争取妇女选举权、与男性平等的经济权和社会立法权运动,向社会显示自身的实力,不仅改变了轻视妇女的传统社会立法,提高了女性的经济地位和社会地位,而且有力地推进了国家的民主化进程。     

Impatience: On Derrida,Milbank and the Decision

Abstract

Derrida has long served as a foil, in the work of John Milbank, and represented the neo-pagan nature of much contemporary philosophy. He appeared in Theology and Social Theory as one of the heirs of Nietzsche, politically justifying and ritualizing violence. In the Vico books, Derrida appears again, contrasted with Vico's ability to imbue language not only with constituting power, but with a teleologically oriented realism. This theme is expanded in subsequent works, where Milbank makes Christological and Trinitarian studies of linguistic difference, and accuses Derrida's thought of degenerating into nihilism. Nonetheless, Milbank and Derrida are disturbed by a similar problem. There is, for both, an irrational moment at the foundations of political life that calls out for a decision. For Derrida this decision institutes the whole order of meaning, undergirded by the quasi-transcendental structure of writing. According to Milbank, this renders all content arbitrary, leaving Derrida unable to imagine a genuinely meaningful world. Milbank argues, instead, that the important decision is whether or not one will see the content of experience as meaningful or meaningless. Derrida's denial of meaning, which is also a denial of God, is ungrounded. One ought, instead, see the world as the image of God.     

‘Grace for the rebels’: the role of the royal pardon in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

This article focuses on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as a means of examining some of the late medieval assumptions about the nature of royal mercy. Rather than adding to the weight of scholarship on the causes and characteristics of the Revolt, this article discusses the views on mercy (‘grace for the rebels’)¹ that were reportedly expressed by all parties during the course of the rebellion. The first section analyses the chronicles and their references to discussion of pardon and mercy during the revolt itself. The second section examines the role of the royal pardon in the subsequent judicial proceedings in the Home Counties — who were the first recipients of pardon, and how were they able to secure royal grace? The final section then discusses the formulation of the pardon in the autumn parliament, and the debate surrounding the course of government policy in the wake of revolt on an unprecedented scale. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Crown and commons shared a common language of pardon, and understood that by framing their discussion in terms of royal grace, they were alluding to a particular kind of idealised relationship between the king and his subjects.     

Countering the hegemony of the Irish national canon: the modernist rhetoric of Seán O'Faoláin (1938–50)1

ABSTRACT. The telling and re‐telling of national history has long been recognised in studies of nationalism as one of its key legitimising and mobilising strategies. In this article I illustrate how a rhetorical approach can effectively explore this dynamic and emotive dimension of nationalist ideology by examining the rhetorical strategies in the Irish liberal intellectual, Seán O'Faoláin's, attempts to reconstitute the popular canon of Irish history in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, I show that contrary to depictions of O'Faoláin as a European liberal who employed rational argument to undermine and encourage the rejection of Irish nationalism and its emphasis on rhetorical narratives of the past, O'Faoláin's challenge to the Irish national canon reveals that he himself mobilised historical narrative to promote his own modernist version of Irish liberal nationalism and demonstrated in the process that he was one of the most skilful rhetors of his day.     

Tolerant majorities,loyal minorities and ‘ethnic reversals’: constructing minority rights at Versailles 1919*

ABSTRACT. The 1919 Versailles Peace Conference created new states in East Central Europe (ECE), but the imperfect implementation of the ‘one nation, one state’ formula resulted in more than twenty‐five million ‘unassimilable’ minorities. With the introduction of majoritarian democracy, this gave rise to what we term ‘ethnic reversals’: ‘formally dominant majorities’ suffered status decline, while previously ‘minoritised majorities’ found new political powers. Accordingly, the 1919 Minorities Treaties sought to manage these ‘ethnic reversals’ by instituting a liberal minority rights regime that tried to create both ‘tolerant majorities’ and ‘loyal minorities’. While the Treaties reflected the influences of Anglo‐American and Anglo‐American Jewish elites – the most notable voices of liberalism in an age of ethnic homogenisation – we suggest that in contexts of historical diversity with little institutionalised liberalism, ‘ethnic reversals’ raise issues that cannot be resolved within liberal conceptions of minority rights that rely solely or primarily on cultural protections.     

Beyond Natural Law Talk: Politics and Prudence in St. Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship

Abstract

As second-wave feminism crested in the 1980s, feminist intellectuals began to radically reappraise liberalism by developing a communitarian “ethic of care” that promised to remake American society and politics. The new communitarianism, however, could not be reconciled with feminist defenses of abortion rights. This tension became increasingly untenable in the late 1980s as Roe v. Wade faced new political challenges. Feminist communitarians responded by re-embracing liberalism, especially its emphasis on autonomy and independence. This history suggests that many feminist intellectuals regard their support for abortion rights as something that is prior to their larger philosophical commitments, such as liberalism and communitarianism.