Seven Of My Favorite Theology Books From 2013
These books will not be for everyone, but if you are interested in theology, you should definitely check some of these out!
7.) Jean-Luc Marion, In The Self's Place: The Approach of St. Augustine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 448pp.
Few traditional figures have served as such a ready whipping boy for what are diagnosed as the root of modern ills than Augustine. Whether it be under the (what I consider to be quite ill-conceived) category of so-called "Classical theism," or "onto-theology,"Augustine shows up as frequently in narratives of western woe as little as he is sympathetically understood. Of course some of the scorn is perhaps well deserved, but others, like the trope that a direct line can be drawn between Augustine and Modernity's other favorite scapegoat, Descartes, rightly need the exorcism they are beginning to receive. Charles Taylor of course famously drew such a line in his wonderful Sources of the Self (he has since nuanced his claim) but many scholars including Rowan Williams and Michael Hanby have begun to question these received narratives of Augustine's proto-Cartesian pedigree. Jean-Luc Marion is perhaps the most powerful attempt to date to undermine such a narrative (and this is no small thing, as Marion himself is of course famous for his anti- Onto-theological program many often assume applies precisely to an Augustine or an Aquinas). By a close reading of Augustine's Confessions (by, to no surprise, Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenological categories developed elsewhere) Marion shows that Augustine's self is not a precursor to the modern autonomous ego, able to find its own stability in itself and survey the world at large as merely a technology to be used (as Heidegger claimed is the pathos of all Western thought). Rather, for Augustine, the self is a sight that "appears" only as a destabilized remainder responding in praise to its own original gifting by God. A difficult, but poetic and often very rewarding read.
6.) Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 286pp.
Another book questioning many "received narratives" of our time, Nongbri follows scholars like Talal Asad, Tomoko Mazuzawa, and the Catholic scholar William Cavanaugh, in attempting to question the "natural" or "obvious" nature of what constitutes the category "religion." A wonderful combination of scholarship, curiosity, and skepticism regarding the viability of the category of religion, it is more of a diagnosis than providing a constructive alternative. Nongbri provides a brisk sojourn through the history of the emergence of the concept of religion, and reveals how startlingly saturated our everyday existence is (in public policy, inter-religious dialogue, et al) by the unreflected category more the product of Protestant and colonial trends than authentic conceptualization what is actually, not a mere set of beliefs, but embodies the whole of human life. For any who have read William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence this is a wonderful and relatively brief supplement.
5.) David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 376pp.
A fun romp as always, Hart's latest book attacks much of the tosh that passes in today's so-called "God-debates" that rage between many of the New Atheists and Christians of a more fundamentalist ilk. To put it somewhat tongue in cheek: while the New Atheists attack only a vision of God-as-demiurge, a finite craftsman who has no specific job to do anymore in the universe because of science and so tilt at windmills thinking them dragons, fundamentalists accept this idol, merely suggesting his stint in the Universe's unemployment line is greatly exaggerated, and thus appear to defend the same windmill by attempt to make it spit fire. Marshaling the riches of the theistic tradition, Hart's often trenchant criticism and elaboration of classic ideas unfold the holistic theology so often forgotten or ignored by today's anemic fisticuffs, even by those purporting to stand on the side of traditionalism.
4.) Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Massachusetts: Wilely: Blackwell, 2013), 452pp.
A tour-de-force of analysis, Hanby's work on theology and science is much akin to works like Louis Dupre's Passage to Modernity in that it attacks the question of the relationship between science and theology from the perspective of how our theological and cosmological concepts have themselves changed, attempting to unearth the reason many of our current conflicts seem inevitable by displaying the historically contingent moments in their logic and construction. As such it is a theologically and philosophically robust display of the history of ideas. Because, as Hanby says "the question of the relationship between theology and science, whatever else it may be, is first and foremost a question of theology." This is because "science" only impacts God negatively if God is viewed, for example, as a designer-God who is invoked as the only explanation for, e.g. irreducibly complex biological systems. This picture of the God-world relation, however, is not necessary to Christianity (and indeed Hanby claims, much as does Hart above, that this picture is quite alien to traditional Christian thought), and itself has an ornate and fascinating history the Hanby details at length.
3.) Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity.' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 452pp.
In my opinion, Trinitarian theology has, as of late, reached certain impasses. We have received several great offerings such as R. Kendal Soulen's latest The Divine Names, but as a whole Trinitarian theology has by and large stagnated into squabbling about its now-cherished tropes (East vs. West, social vs psychological analogies, substance vs personalist ontology, perichoresis vs simplicity etc...) many of which are themselves binary either/ors predicated on severe misreadings of the traditions they presume to comment upon (again our theme of misreading tradition emerges! For what its worth it is a theme of my Th.M. thesis, so it has been on my mind). Coakley attempts a complex mediation of contemporary anemia by pointing out that one of the key habits of misreading the tradition comes precisely by not paying attention to how their own Trinitarian theology intersects with their visions of prayer, ascetical life, gender, and desire (which she remedies by looking in particular at Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa, among others). She laments that many Trinitarian projects too easily jump not only to "purely" philosophical or theological issues such as the problems of the one and the many (something I believe many in the Analytical theology camp often fall prey to) but this also begins to effect historiographical issues in that, for example, we begin to read the tradition purely by the precedent set by many of its giants such as an Athanasius, and woefully ignore the more complex (and of course, much messier) first three centuries of discourse which emphasized the role of the Spirit in ways that, Coakley opines, have been ignored. To my mind Coakley is (as I have said before) one of the most learned theologians working today, and one of the pleasures of this book is that she bears this learning lightly. It is written in such a way as to be accessible even to the laymen, and instead of footnotes, for example, she reserves displaying most of her sources until the ends of chapters). This is a fascinating initial look on how the Trinity is, as so many are wont to say "the most practical doctrine," and its approach is both refreshingly unique and attentive and charitable to the sources it interacts with.
2.) Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Baylor: Baylor University Press, 2012), 500pp.
A fascinating and heartbreaking read, much as was William Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist. Unlike Cavanaugh's work, Radner's book is primarily about the perennial failures of the Christian church to deliver on its promises of peace, unity, and love. In fact Radner quite consciously opposes his own work to that of Cavanaugh, especially the latter's The Myth of Religious Violence. Though I think Radner too easily views Cavanaugh as a pure foil to his own project (thus I think glossing over many of the nuances in Cavanaugh) Radner's basic point is often quite sound: the many failures of the church are often precisely the impetus for the liberal nation state to try and ameliorate the mess. So, far from it being, say, an emaciated form of Christian discourse (e.g. Milbank) or a fundamental fragmentation of tradition (e.g. Hauerwas, MacIntyre) modern Liberal democracy in fact became the only fall back position to the horrors and atrocities committed, or allowed, by Christianity over its history. Thus we do not need to attack it (again, ala Hauerwas) but realize that the church and Liberal-Democratic world are mutually reinforcing concepts that need each other. I disagreed with many of Radner's conclusions but his analysis is often eye-opening and serves as a historian's version of Donald Miller's "Confession Booth" scene in Blue Like Jazz. In Radner's opinion, the only way forward is to view our own atrocities with all their horror so that we can repent, and perhaps better understand the socio-political and spiritual world in which we now find ourselves. But without further ado, my favorite book of 2013!
1.) Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 192pp.
This quiet little masterpiece has the essential quality of any truly authentic theological meditation: it will almost drown you in a sort of absolute silence, only to pull back and show you something beautiful. Wiman, a poet and recent convert to Christianity, is suffering from a rare type of bone-cancer. Incurable, and utterly painful, Wiman reflects on his life and his struggles to understand the transcendence he sees saturating the ordinary by invoking his immense knowledge of poetry, and his own talents as a poet. This is a book-length wrestling with grace, and what we might say are the dark shadows left behind once our own ecstatic moments of receiving grace fade back into the ordinary of our "fireless lives." How does one manage to understand the whole of life from those moments of grace? How does one manage life, after grace soaked it for a moment, but beyond our control, seems to vanish and makes the mundane even more so? "Do not fall in love with your sadness," says Wiman, for there is nothing so secretly comforting as the control of sadness. If there is any book on this list I would say is a "must read" this is it. It is also, mercifully, the shortest on the list so go now, take up and read.
Few traditional figures have served as such a ready whipping boy for what are diagnosed as the root of modern ills than Augustine. Whether it be under the (what I consider to be quite ill-conceived) category of so-called "Classical theism," or "onto-theology,"Augustine shows up as frequently in narratives of western woe as little as he is sympathetically understood. Of course some of the scorn is perhaps well deserved, but others, like the trope that a direct line can be drawn between Augustine and Modernity's other favorite scapegoat, Descartes, rightly need the exorcism they are beginning to receive. Charles Taylor of course famously drew such a line in his wonderful Sources of the Self (he has since nuanced his claim) but many scholars including Rowan Williams and Michael Hanby have begun to question these received narratives of Augustine's proto-Cartesian pedigree. Jean-Luc Marion is perhaps the most powerful attempt to date to undermine such a narrative (and this is no small thing, as Marion himself is of course famous for his anti- Onto-theological program many often assume applies precisely to an Augustine or an Aquinas). By a close reading of Augustine's Confessions (by, to no surprise, Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenological categories developed elsewhere) Marion shows that Augustine's self is not a precursor to the modern autonomous ego, able to find its own stability in itself and survey the world at large as merely a technology to be used (as Heidegger claimed is the pathos of all Western thought). Rather, for Augustine, the self is a sight that "appears" only as a destabilized remainder responding in praise to its own original gifting by God. A difficult, but poetic and often very rewarding read.
Another book questioning many "received narratives" of our time, Nongbri follows scholars like Talal Asad, Tomoko Mazuzawa, and the Catholic scholar William Cavanaugh, in attempting to question the "natural" or "obvious" nature of what constitutes the category "religion." A wonderful combination of scholarship, curiosity, and skepticism regarding the viability of the category of religion, it is more of a diagnosis than providing a constructive alternative. Nongbri provides a brisk sojourn through the history of the emergence of the concept of religion, and reveals how startlingly saturated our everyday existence is (in public policy, inter-religious dialogue, et al) by the unreflected category more the product of Protestant and colonial trends than authentic conceptualization what is actually, not a mere set of beliefs, but embodies the whole of human life. For any who have read William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence this is a wonderful and relatively brief supplement.
A fun romp as always, Hart's latest book attacks much of the tosh that passes in today's so-called "God-debates" that rage between many of the New Atheists and Christians of a more fundamentalist ilk. To put it somewhat tongue in cheek: while the New Atheists attack only a vision of God-as-demiurge, a finite craftsman who has no specific job to do anymore in the universe because of science and so tilt at windmills thinking them dragons, fundamentalists accept this idol, merely suggesting his stint in the Universe's unemployment line is greatly exaggerated, and thus appear to defend the same windmill by attempt to make it spit fire. Marshaling the riches of the theistic tradition, Hart's often trenchant criticism and elaboration of classic ideas unfold the holistic theology so often forgotten or ignored by today's anemic fisticuffs, even by those purporting to stand on the side of traditionalism.
A tour-de-force of analysis, Hanby's work on theology and science is much akin to works like Louis Dupre's Passage to Modernity in that it attacks the question of the relationship between science and theology from the perspective of how our theological and cosmological concepts have themselves changed, attempting to unearth the reason many of our current conflicts seem inevitable by displaying the historically contingent moments in their logic and construction. As such it is a theologically and philosophically robust display of the history of ideas. Because, as Hanby says "the question of the relationship between theology and science, whatever else it may be, is first and foremost a question of theology." This is because "science" only impacts God negatively if God is viewed, for example, as a designer-God who is invoked as the only explanation for, e.g. irreducibly complex biological systems. This picture of the God-world relation, however, is not necessary to Christianity (and indeed Hanby claims, much as does Hart above, that this picture is quite alien to traditional Christian thought), and itself has an ornate and fascinating history the Hanby details at length.
In my opinion, Trinitarian theology has, as of late, reached certain impasses. We have received several great offerings such as R. Kendal Soulen's latest The Divine Names, but as a whole Trinitarian theology has by and large stagnated into squabbling about its now-cherished tropes (East vs. West, social vs psychological analogies, substance vs personalist ontology, perichoresis vs simplicity etc...) many of which are themselves binary either/ors predicated on severe misreadings of the traditions they presume to comment upon (again our theme of misreading tradition emerges! For what its worth it is a theme of my Th.M. thesis, so it has been on my mind). Coakley attempts a complex mediation of contemporary anemia by pointing out that one of the key habits of misreading the tradition comes precisely by not paying attention to how their own Trinitarian theology intersects with their visions of prayer, ascetical life, gender, and desire (which she remedies by looking in particular at Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa, among others). She laments that many Trinitarian projects too easily jump not only to "purely" philosophical or theological issues such as the problems of the one and the many (something I believe many in the Analytical theology camp often fall prey to) but this also begins to effect historiographical issues in that, for example, we begin to read the tradition purely by the precedent set by many of its giants such as an Athanasius, and woefully ignore the more complex (and of course, much messier) first three centuries of discourse which emphasized the role of the Spirit in ways that, Coakley opines, have been ignored. To my mind Coakley is (as I have said before) one of the most learned theologians working today, and one of the pleasures of this book is that she bears this learning lightly. It is written in such a way as to be accessible even to the laymen, and instead of footnotes, for example, she reserves displaying most of her sources until the ends of chapters). This is a fascinating initial look on how the Trinity is, as so many are wont to say "the most practical doctrine," and its approach is both refreshingly unique and attentive and charitable to the sources it interacts with.
A fascinating and heartbreaking read, much as was William Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist. Unlike Cavanaugh's work, Radner's book is primarily about the perennial failures of the Christian church to deliver on its promises of peace, unity, and love. In fact Radner quite consciously opposes his own work to that of Cavanaugh, especially the latter's The Myth of Religious Violence. Though I think Radner too easily views Cavanaugh as a pure foil to his own project (thus I think glossing over many of the nuances in Cavanaugh) Radner's basic point is often quite sound: the many failures of the church are often precisely the impetus for the liberal nation state to try and ameliorate the mess. So, far from it being, say, an emaciated form of Christian discourse (e.g. Milbank) or a fundamental fragmentation of tradition (e.g. Hauerwas, MacIntyre) modern Liberal democracy in fact became the only fall back position to the horrors and atrocities committed, or allowed, by Christianity over its history. Thus we do not need to attack it (again, ala Hauerwas) but realize that the church and Liberal-Democratic world are mutually reinforcing concepts that need each other. I disagreed with many of Radner's conclusions but his analysis is often eye-opening and serves as a historian's version of Donald Miller's "Confession Booth" scene in Blue Like Jazz. In Radner's opinion, the only way forward is to view our own atrocities with all their horror so that we can repent, and perhaps better understand the socio-political and spiritual world in which we now find ourselves. But without further ado, my favorite book of 2013!
This quiet little masterpiece has the essential quality of any truly authentic theological meditation: it will almost drown you in a sort of absolute silence, only to pull back and show you something beautiful. Wiman, a poet and recent convert to Christianity, is suffering from a rare type of bone-cancer. Incurable, and utterly painful, Wiman reflects on his life and his struggles to understand the transcendence he sees saturating the ordinary by invoking his immense knowledge of poetry, and his own talents as a poet. This is a book-length wrestling with grace, and what we might say are the dark shadows left behind once our own ecstatic moments of receiving grace fade back into the ordinary of our "fireless lives." How does one manage to understand the whole of life from those moments of grace? How does one manage life, after grace soaked it for a moment, but beyond our control, seems to vanish and makes the mundane even more so? "Do not fall in love with your sadness," says Wiman, for there is nothing so secretly comforting as the control of sadness. If there is any book on this list I would say is a "must read" this is it. It is also, mercifully, the shortest on the list so go now, take up and read.
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