Do Radical Theologians Pray?: A Spirituality of the Event

Radical theology is not only an academic inquiry but also a radical spirituality. This point is confirmed in the phenomenology of radical prayer found in Derrida’s “Circumfession”. Derrida’s prayer takes place in a theopoetic space opened by a theopoetic epoche, which suspends both the supernatural...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Caputo, John D. 1940- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI 2021
In: Religions
Year: 2021, Volume: 12, Issue: 9
Further subjects:B Augustine
B event radical theology
B theopoetic epoche
B Confession
B circumfession
B Derrida
B radical spirituality
B spectrality
B Prayer
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Summary:Radical theology is not only an academic inquiry but also a radical spirituality. This point is confirmed in the phenomenology of radical prayer found in Derrida’s “Circumfession”. Derrida’s prayer takes place in a theopoetic space opened by a theopoetic epoche, which suspends both the supernatural signified (supernaturalism, praying to a Supreme Being) and the transcendental signified (rationalism, reducing prayer to a subjective fantasy). Radical prayer is compared to Augustine’s prayer in the Confessions, taken here as a paradigm of classical prayer. The difference is not that Augustine is really praying and Derrida’s prayer is a literary conceit, but that Augustine’s prayer takes place within a determined set of “beliefs”, of material symbols in which to incarnate his prayer, of which Derrida is deprived, from which he is circum-cut. But this very deprivation or de-materialization renders Derrida’s prayer an even more radical one, belonging to a more spectral “faith”, to the spirituality of a radical theology, to a theology of the event, by which traditional spirituality is both nourished and inwardly disturbed.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel12090679