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Course papers, journal articles and book chapters by our graduate students.
Students retain the copyright of their research and conference papers. Under the terms of our Non-Exclusive Licence students grant ICS the right to preserve and disseminate their publications via the ICS Institutional Repository and other third party databases.
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Recent Submissions
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On the Varieties of Religious Rationality: Plato (and the Buddha) Versus the New AtheistsHolocaust survivor Victor Frankl claims that human beings are spiritually and mentally free, and that it is possible to maintain one's dignity even in a concentration camp. If this tremendous claim is true, it is true regardless of who says it. However, it is only when the claim is made by someone like Frankl that it functions rhetorically, actually prompting the listener to reflect on what it might mean. In the Georgias, Socrates argues for an even more extreme version of this same idea: that it would be better to be tortured to death than to torture someone else, because it is impossible for a torturer to be happy. This paper shows why, if what Frankl and Socrates say is true, both tradition and myth are perfectly rational modes of discourse, and why a culture that rejects the capacity of tradition and myth to disclose truth will almost inevitably reject these claims as irrational. This discussion is framed in terms of an interesting disjunct in the meaning of the term "atheist," as it is used by the New Atheists and as it is used by Plato, and is set in dialogue with the claims of as Vipassana meditation teacher S. N. Goenka, whose teachings bear remarkable similarity to Plato's.
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Risking idolatry? Theopoetics and the promise of embodimentJohn Caputo recently remarked that deconstructionism has not taken hold in the church as he had hoped. The "good news of post-modernism" is not generating the kind of buzz that a gospel should. Is this perhaps because deconstruction is unable to fully embody an alternative, life-giving picture to traditional ways of theologizing? Poetics, etymologically, is about the creation of something new. Despite its ability to break apart ossified ground in order to open up fertile earth for new possibilities, is deconstructionism unable to provide the newness which the church seeks? This essay suggests, with theopoet Rubem Alves, that we do not simply wait for God's promised future. Instead, we make (or fail to make) God bodily present to our fellow human beings and to creation as a whole. To answer this calling means practicing Luther's imperative to "sin boldly" in pursuit of justice (hence "risking idolatry"). Caputo writes that "deconstruction saves us from idolatry," but what this results in is a paralysis which prevents us from embodying the presence of God in the world? What if our calling is such that it brings us right up against the brink of idolatry? Theopoetics, in a Wittgensteinian sort of therapy, might be able to offer a different picture that both resists the ossification of language, and is able to better handle the church's calling to function as the body of Christ, a Nazarene who claimed to be God
