Does anyone else on the list have the same reaction to the atheist 'er apologetics of presses like Prometheus Books, The Humanist, Free Inquiry and The Skeptical Inquirer? Cold, dry, soulless. As if life can be explained purely as colliding molecules.
Academic Christians? http://www.facultylinc.com/national/connections.nsf/Societies?OpenForm Christian Academic and Professional Societies. Look at Commonweal, Sojourners, First Things, America or Christianity Today. Theologians on the left like Tillich, Dorothee Solle, Jurgen Moltmann, are they not intellectuals? Lots of theologians grapple w/ pomo and thinkers like Habermas and Foucault.
http://www.jcrt.org/ The editors of The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory wish to extend their deepest condolences to the family and friends of Jacques Derrida who died in Paris on October 8th from pancreatic cancer.
One cannot begin to measure, nor foresee an end to measuring Jacques Derrida’s contribution to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. His early writings on phenomenology and structuralism redefined the fields of literary, philosophical, and linguistic study. With a reassessment of Saussure’s linguistic theory, Derrida’s turn “to and on” language re-imagined perennial questions concerning the correspondence of meaning and word. His middle and later works had the same force of inquiry in the fields of aesthetics, psychoanalysis, politics, and religious theory. There is no academic discipline or sub-discipline across these many fields that has not strongly felt the thought and creativity of Jacques Derrida.
One may label his collective philosophy “deconstructionism,” “poststructuralism,” “postmodernism,” or simply “theory.” In whatever rigid mode it is assigned and for whatever purpose, it will exceed confinement. Whatever we may say and however we may say it, we will not begin to capture the force of his thinking and the many ideas and arguments it has inspired or will inspire. In this respect, even with his death, the future or, at least, “a” future belongs to Jacques Derrida. The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory and the scholarship associated with it would not have been possible without Jacques Derrida. For many of us in “cultural and religious theory,” Jacques Derrida provided us with intellectual spaces to occupy and, subsequently, migrate from—these openings were created by his writings, his lectures, and, to those fortunate few, an encouraging conversation in a quiet corner of a swirling conference hall. The JCRT will remain part of Jacques Derrida’s “future” and he will remain part of ours.
V. Taylor, Executive Editor, JCRT -- Michael Pugliese