Exploring the intersection of personal faith and theological reflection, this work emphasizes the importance of spiritual autobiographies from ordinary individuals. These narratives, often emerging from the fringes of church and society, challenge conventional views and encourage deeper self-examination of one's spiritual journey. By analyzing a diverse range of writers across history, the book highlights how acknowledging personal struggles and "poverty" can lead to a more profound understanding of faith, blending confession of sins with the expression of belief.
Exploring the historical significance of fetish-objects, this book examines their role in political and religious power struggles, revealing their symbolic importance as sites of transcendence. It employs a comparative approach, drawing from various disciplines including anthropology, psychology, and theology, to uncover the political implications of fetish-objects within a Western context. By reframing these objects as forms of resistance, it highlights their influence on Christian practices and invites a reevaluation of their relevance in contemporary society.
The Polymers is a bold new work from one of our most ambitious poetic minds. Structured as an imaginary science project, the varied pieces in this collection investigate the intersection of poetry and chemicals, specifically plastics, attempting to understand their essential role in culture. Through various procedures, constraints, and formal mutations, the poems express the repeating structures fundamental to plastic molecules as they appear in cultural and linguistic behaviours such as arguments, anxieties, and trends. A wildly experimental and chemically reactive work, The Polymers thrills and provokes. You’ll never look at the world of a poem ― or the world itself ― in the same way again.
"The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author's biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we're doing to our world -- and to our own bodies."--Amazon.com
The book delves into 20th-century continental thought, addressing contemporary issues in continental philosophy and political theology. It examines the implications of transitioning into a post-secular era, highlighting the relevance of these philosophical inquiries to current developments and debates. Through its analysis, it provides insights into how these fields intersect and evolve in response to modern challenges.
Exploring the concept of being haunted by repressed fears and unconscious elements, the book delves into how these "ghosts" influence our self-perception and understanding. It emphasizes the importance of confronting these hauntings as a means of self-honesty, paralleling humanity's historical struggle with divine forces. Through reflections on hauntings in continental philosophy, personal identity, language, and autobiographical narratives, the study reveals the inescapable nature of these influences on our lives and writings.
Dickinson traces the development of two concepts, the messianic and the canonical, as they circulate, interweave and contest each other in the work of three prominent continental philosophers: Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, though a strong supporting cast of Jan Assmann, Gershom Scholem, Jacob Taubes and Paul Ricoeur, among others, also play their respective roles throughout this study. He isolates how their various interactions with their chosen terms reflects a good deal of what is said within the various discourses that constitute what we have conveniently labelled, often in mistakenly monolithic terms, as 'Theology'.By narrowing the scope of this study to the dynamics generated historically by these contrasting terms, he also seeks to determine what exactly lies at the heart of theology's seemingly most treasured object: the presentation beyond any representation, the supposed true nucleus of all revelation and what lies behind any search for a 'theology of immanence' today.
This book investigates the form of spirituality given shape in the
intersection of poetics and theological-philosophical reflection, concerned
especially with matters of representation and failure.
