Anatheism

Preface Acknowledgments One Prelude Introduction: God After God 1. In the Moment: The Uninvited Guest 2. In the Wager: The Fivefold Motion 3. In the Name: After Auschwitz Who Can Say God? Two Interlude 4. In the Flesh: Sacramental Imagination 5. In the Text: Joyce, Proust, Woolf Three Postlude 6. In the World: Between Secular and Sacred 7. In the Act: Between Word and Flesh Conclusion: Welcoming Strange Gods Epilogue Notes Index

Richard Kearney holds the Charles H. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and is visiting professor at University College Dublin. The author of two novels and a volume of poetry, his most recent philosophical works include the trilogy Philosophy at the Limits: Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Ideas of Otherness, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, and On Stories (Thinking in Action).

Richard Kearney is an eminent contributor to Continental philosophy and to the Continental turn to religion. This book is an important contribution to the turn toward the philosophy of religion. Kearney helps to define a field that is new: the return of religion not only to the center of public and intellectual life but also to the center of significant discussion in the humanities. Anatheism is an exciting, imaginative, and robust account of the life of faith in the postmodern world, a world marked by cultural plurality and religious strife, by militant faiths and militant attacks on faith. Richard Kearney moves with ease across a breathtaking amount of literature and cultures in an effort to retrieve a more mature and complex faith, beyond both doubt and dogmatism, to find the sacred in the secular, to see God in the world. Hospitality is first among the virtues for Kearney-both the hospitality that religion is and the hospitality to be shown among religions. This book is everything we have come to expect from Kearney-clear, fascinating, and engaging, all in all a major contribution to the contemporary continental philosophy of religion. Anatheism is a philosophical and personal exploration, reminiscent of Augustine's Confessions, of how one might envisage God after his demise. The book weaves a rich philosophical tapestry of cultural, literary, political, and religious reflections that give witness and content to how the God who has become a stranger might be ethically welcomed today. This remarkable work is, in the most positive sense, an intellectual 'tour de faiblesse.' It advocates a form of post-theism that enables a rediscovery of a 'powerless' sacred in the midst of a self-assured secular. A phenomenological and hermeneutic exercise that is of great significance and assured controversy. Kearney invites us all to a space he calls 'anatheism,' a place that precedes belief and unbelief where the close-minded dogmatism of either theism or atheism is left at