Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God

Description

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

Charlie Gere is a Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, UK. He is author of Digital Culture (2002/2008), Art, Time and Technology (2006), and Community without Community in Digital Culture (2012), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic (2009), and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010).

Gere's extraordinarily readable philosophical and theological meditations demonstrate how to do "theory" well for scholars and students alike. It reads like a who's who of significant thinkers on the nature of media, literature, nature, death, and God ... Unnatural Theology offers an exceptional opportunity to explore radical theologies with students in advanced or introductory graduate seminars and may be the intellectual nourishment that advanced scholars might crave as well. * Reading Religion * Gere's book proves a provocative and deep analysis of important contemporary issues ... Summing Up: Recommended. Ambitious upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * Gere's book is a prime example of how political theology is entering into new areas, such as art and media. ... The book is an important contribution to political theology. * The Heythrop Journal * A fascinating collection of essays exploring the terrain of the unsaid or unsay-able that constitutes recent accounts of the self-consciousness of existence. The writing is accessible and utterly enjoyable, because Gere firmly anchors at every turn his intellectual reflections to his personal experience. This work is a significant contribution to the literature of immanence and embodied thought, offering a vivid picture to the reader of what, precisely, an aesthetics of experience may reveal about our art, our culture, and ourselves. -- Michael Corris, Professor, Meadows School for the Arts, Southern Methodist University, USA Gere has made a significant contribution toward the future of theological thought. Through an exploration of art, language, violence, religious experience and philosophical insight, Gere wagers that there may just be enough within the apparent absence of the divine-its potential and contingency especially-to awaken a new form of religious experience. Providing a deep resonance with radical theologies that do not shy away from nihilism and the secular, but rather search the void present within the name of God itself, Gere opens our eyes toward a reality already sitting before us, waiting to be seen anew. * Colby Dickinson, Associate Professor of Theology, Loyola University Chicago, USA * Amidst the multiple afterlives of unorthodox theological reflection, Charlie Gere offers a fresh new voice in Unnatural Theology. He reserves only the name of God as an empty signifier, but this name continues to offer important insights. This concise but sweeping vision combines theory with explorations of media technologies, including photography, pornography, and pop art, to mine the border between belief and nonbelief for what remains significant for any credible theology today. * Clayton Crockett, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, University of Central Arkansas, USA *