God and the Philosophers: A Newsletter from James K.A. Smith
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How to Inhabit Time: new book releases 9.20.22
August 5, 2022
I have a new book coming out on September 20 entitled How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now. I think it sits...
Early Modern Philosophy as "Detour": or, Teaching the History of Modern Philosophy as if Rorty Was Right
January 13, 2022
I have just begun teaching a new rendition of my department's course in the history of modern philosophy (1600-1900). Since I take a rather unorthodox...
A change for "God and the Philosophers"
October 28, 2021
Dear Readers, It was just about 1 year ago that I launched the "God and the Philosophers" newsletter. It was very much a pandemic project. My usually busy...
Rorty, Religion, and History
October 23, 2021
I came to appreciate Richard Rorty a little later in my career. It's not that I hadn't encountered him earlier. When I was in grad school in the 90s,...
Archives Access REDUX
October 18, 2021
My thanks to those of you who noted you were still having trouble accessing the archives to "God and the Philosophers." The administrators at Buttondown have...
Access to "God and the Philosophers" archive
October 11, 2021
Dear Readers, While I'm waiting on the folks at Buttondown to fix the archive feature for premium subscribers, in the meantime I'm making the archive to my...
Theology in the Footnotes: How Philosophers Misunderstand Hegel
October 9, 2021
Indulge me: I want to write an entire post about two footnotes. But only because these footnotes are illustrative of the unique challenge for reading the...
Lyotard's Other: Justice and Transcendence
September 18, 2021
Last time we considered themes from Lyotard's too-much-neglected work, Just Gaming, particularly the way in which pluralism is not just something to be...
Terror, Injustice, and Plurality: On Jean-François Lyotard's "Just Gaming"
September 11, 2021
In a famous "report on knowledge" for the government of Quebec, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard hazarded a definition of postmodernism and,...
Hume's Mysticism Redux
September 4, 2021
[Readers, thanks for your patience and flexibility as I've worked through my first summer as a newsletter writer. This is the first of 4 newsletters you'll...
Hume the Fideist?
July 31, 2021
[Summer vacation has jostled the usual 2nd/4th Saturday schedule. Nevertheless, here's a second installment for July. We'll hope to return to regular...
Creation as Revelation in Franz Rosenzweig
July 17, 2021
In just one month, my new book, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology, will be published by Baylor University Press. As a teaser, I’m here...
"The Christian Occurrence": Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Theology & Time
June 26, 2021
At the heart of Christianity is not a teaching but an event. Revelation is something that unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens....
Accessing the archives for "God and the Philosophers"
June 21, 2021
Dear Readers, Thanks for your patience as I work to get all subscribers access to the archives of this newsletter. I am hoping that I have now finally solved...
The Dark Absolute: A Tentative Note upon Re-Reading Hegel
June 12, 2021
This summer my headspace is dominated by a new book I am writing titled When Are We? I won’t bore you with the details (just yet!) except to say that it is a...
Sympathy for Nietzsche: On Mummification and History
May 22, 2021
A million years ago, when we were earnest, we watched The Matrix. In a key early scene, Neo stores his renegade hacker disks in a copy of Baudrillard’s...
Nihilism as a Preamble to Faith?
May 8, 2021
In a recent newsletter on Jean-Luc Marion’s account of vanity and boredom, I mentioned Conor Cunningham’s fascinating book, Genealogy of Nihilism. It’d been...
Ricoeur on the Problem with "the Problem of Evil"
April 24, 2021
There is a kind of philosophical response to evil that is itself ghoulish. I think of this every time I teach Keith Yandell’s rather classic essay on “The...
Jean-Luc Marion on Boredom, Vanity, and the Strange Witness of Idols
April 10, 2021
Most of the time, for most of us, the world is too solid, too reified, too much a “given” to be transpierced by transcendence. So, in the mundane, Jean-Luc...
The History of Philosophy AS Philosophy: Some Pointers from Jean-Luc Marion
March 27, 2021
I hope you’ll indulge a bit of a swerve this week. As I hope you’ve sensed, one of the animating convictions of my work as a philosopher is that the...
Sympathy for the Fool: O.K. Bouwsma on Anselm
March 13, 2021
O.K. Bouwsma’s essay, “Anselm’s Argument,” is vintage Bouwsma: playful yet deadly serious; delightfully idiosyncratic yet provocatively incisive; irreverent,...
Anselm's endeavor: on his so-called "ontological argument"
February 27, 2021
Anselm, an Italian who became the Archbishop of Canterbuy from 1093 to 1109, was a monk who bequeathed to philosophy what came to be described as the...
Paradox is the Passion of Thought: Kierkegaard's "Philosophical Fragments"
February 13, 2021
When it comes to the question of philosophy's relationship to God, I suggest there are two very different traditions or postures--two different threads that...
The Allure of God: Aristotle's Final Cause
January 23, 2021
The animating thesis of this newsletter is a question asked by Heidegger: "How does the deity enter into philosophy, not just modern philosophy, but...
"A spiritual intrigue wholly other than gnosis": A brief introduction to Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
January 9, 2021
On the rare days when I lament the fact I don’t teach in a PhD program, it’s mostly because I would love the excuse to teach an in-depth seminar on Emmanuel...
Plausibility is a Moving Target: Reconsidering Aquinas
December 26, 2020
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, I took a number of philosophy courses “across the river” (as the philosophers at the university...
Advent Edition: The Most Fascinating Philosopher of Religion You've Never Heard Of
December 12, 2020
I have the privilege of teaching in a rather storied department. We sometimes like to boast that Philosophy at Calvin College (now University), a smallish...
The I(nte)rruption of the Cogito: Descartes' Meditations II and III
November 28, 2020
A prefatory suggestion: If you haven't done so, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read Descartes' Meditations I-III. But not essential. When we...
Faith and Reason in Descartes' Meditations
November 14, 2020
Welcome to the first instalment of "God and the Philosophers," a newsletter project I've been contemplating for a while. Since many people associate me with...