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Charles E.
Winquist, The Surface of the Deep
Philosophical and Cultural Studies
in Religion
The Surface of the Deep
is Charles Winquist’s final book and serves as the culmination of
his work. Professor Winquist worked on
The Surface of the Deep
until shortly before his death on April 4, 2002. His intention was
to provide a republication of his first book,
The Transcendental
Imagination, along with other essays written over the course of
the last decade, in order to demonstrate how his theology had
developed from its beginnings. This was to function as platform and
prolegomenon to his future work.
Deeply indebted to Paul Tillich’s philosophical theology of culture,
Winquist also radicalized Tillich’s thought by completing the break
with ecclesiastical theology. Like Tillich, Winquist worked on the
edge of the most influential and important academic, philosophical,
and theoretical discourses. At the same time, Winquist never lost
touch with human and religious experience and was always sensitive
to the constraints of and on theological thinking. Winquist
developed a sophisticated methodology that situated theology in
relation to the study of religion and within a thoroughly secular
culture. Theology was a discourse formation that functioned to
fissure other discourses by pushing them to their limits and
interrogating them as to their sense and practicability.
***
“From Whitehead and Tillich, and Kant and Lonergan, all the way to
Deleuze and Derrida, from a transcendental interrogation of the
intelligibility of being to a deconstructive desiring theology,
The Surface of the Deep is the fascinating journey of Charles
Winquist, one of twentieth century American theology’s most
brilliant and original minds. For Winquist, theology is always the
disturbing disruptive voice that prevents our discourse from
closing, that keeps thinking open to a desire for the other, to a
desire beyond desire, for something we know not what that is lodged
in the surface of the familiar and ordinary. An extraordinary
pilgrimage, a sparkling mind.”
—John D. Caputo
“Charles Winquist’s
The Surface of the Deep offers a
posthumous challenge to scholars and philosophers of religion to
continue to think religion through with a range and freedom that is
supported by rigorous phenomenological method at its best. By
honoring theology while making minimal truth-claims for its purchase
on our disciplines, Winquist clears a space for attending to the
surface as well as the deep structure of articulated spiritual
experience, to its graininess, its style, its ethics and aesthetics,
and to the desire for significance that will not allow us to rest in
dogma, however much we recognize its pressure on what we say. Like
his Desiring Theology, which has inspired many both inside
and outside his own school of thought, this book makes sense, and
makes sense with elegance and humanity.”
— Cleo Kearns
“For Charles Winquist, the only thinking that mattered was thinking
that both expressed and provoked desire. Having fathomed the depths
of desire, he resurfaced to bring us haunting letters whose messages
are profoundly unsettling.
The Surface of the Deep is the
final trace of a remarkable voice that fell silent all too soon.”
—
Mark C. Taylor
“The Surface of the Deep
is a profound…thirty-year meditation on the most pressing concerns
in the study of theology and philosophy in the last half of the
twentieth century. Through these collected critical engagements with
the major works of such figures as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, A.N. Whitehead, Jacques Lacan,
Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the writings of Charles E.
Winquist reveal the genesis of a distinctive ‘postmodern theology’
as a recurring surface for theoretical thinking.”
— Victor E.
Taylor, author of Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Part 1 A Preliminary Problematic
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 An Epistemological Conception of the Transcendental
Imagination
Chapter 3 Transcendental Ontology
Chapter 4 An Ontological Conception of the Transcendental
Imagination
Chapter 5 The Development of a Hermeneutical Theology
Part II Theoretical Elaborations
Chapter 6 The Surface of the Deep: Deconstruction in the Study
of Religion
Chapter 7 The Theological Becoming of Metaphysics
Chapter 8 The Silence of the Real: Theology at the End of the
Century
Chapter 9 Theology and the Pedagogy of the Sacred
Chapter 10 Person, Subjectivity, Self
Chapter 11 The Ambiguous Gift of Desire
Chapter 12 Thinking Religion
Chapter 13 Materiality and Theoretical Reflection
Chapter 14 Postmodern Secular Theology
Part III Theological Filiations
Chapter 15 Paul Tillich and Theology Beside Itself
Chapter 16 Paul Tillich and Untimely History
Chapter 17 Langdon Gilkey: Theology, Symbolism and Language
Chapter 18 Analogy, Apology and the Imaginative Pluralism of David
Tracy
Chapter 19 Jacques Derrida and the Study of Religion
Chapter 20 Julia Kristeva and Amatory Discourse
Chapter 21 Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
Chapter 22 Jacques Lacan and Theology
Author
Charles E.
Winquist (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1970) was Thomas J.
Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University from
1986 until his death in 2002. He was a pioneer in
postmodern, deconstructive theology and is a highly regarded
theoretician of religion whose work is “constitutive of one
of the more original sets of theological reflections of the
late twentieth century.” (James J. DiCenso, University of
Toronto). Among his publications are
Desiring Theology
(1995), Theology at the End of the Century (1990),
Epiphanies of Darkness (1986, 1999),
Practical
Hermeneutics (1980),
Homecoming (1978), Communion
of Possibility (1975), and
The Transcendental
Imagination (1972).
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