“However, it is not the case that in any genus—even [the genus] of motion—we come to an unqualifiedly maximum and minimum. Hence, if we consider the various movements of the spheres, [we will see that] it is not possible for the world-machine to have, as a fixed and immovable centre, either our perceptible earth or air or fire or any other thing.

“Hence, the world does not have a [fixed] circumference. For if it had a fixed center, it would also have a [fixed] circumference; and hence it would have its own beginning and end within itself, and it would be bounded in relation to something else, and beyond the world there would be something else and space (locus). But all these [consequences] are false. Therefore, since it is not possible for the world to be enclosed between [a physical] center and a physical circumference, the world—of which God is the centre and the circumference—is not understood. And although the world is not infinite, it cannot be conceived as finite, because it lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed” (Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, trans. Jasper Hopkins [Minneapolis: Banning, 1981], II.11; p. 114).

Karsten Harries associates this quotation with the Camille Flammarion woodcut (pictured above) in her Infinity and Perspective (pp. 46-8). The caption on the woodcut reads Un missionaire du moyen age raconte qu’il avait trouvé le “point où le ciel et la Terre se touchent”. Nothing more to add just now, but I really dig this.

CALL FOR PAPERS
KIERKEGAARD’S UPBUILDING DISCOURSES

Oxford Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought
International Conference
16–18 April, 2010

The Oxford Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought, in connection with the Søren Kierkegaard Society of the UK, is pleased to announce an international conference focusing on Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses. While often overlooked, the Upbuilding Discourses provide a rich ground for understanding Kierkegaard’s wider work, as well as his own identity. Furthermore, the Discourses offer a valuable contribution to a more general discussion of such issues as sin, love,  suffering, salvation, and personal identity.

This will be the first of three conferences on Kierkegaard’s Discourses, and will focus on the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses of 1843-4, and the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Further conferences will consider the discourses of 1847 (Århus, 2010), and Kierkegaard’s final discourses (Copenhagen, 2011).

Alongside the main speakers, there is the opportunity for the presentation of shorter papers of between 20-30 minutes. Abstracts of 300-500 words are invited on a wide range of themes related to the conference topic.

To submit an abstract or for further information, please contact Dr Matthew Kirkpatrick at – kierkegaard.conference@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 1st March, 2010.

For further details about the conference, including accommodation, fees, and registration, please visit www.kierkegaard.org.uk.

Speakers include:

Christopher Barnett
Iben Damgaard
Arne Grøn
Helle Møller Jensen
George Pattison
Jolita Pons
David Possen
Hugh Pyper
Joel Rasmussen
Steven Shakespeare
Claudia Welz

Helpfully, the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions was also one of the volumes recently published in paperback.

Lastly, here’s the CFP poster if you’d like to download it: Kierkegaard Conference – Call for Papers.

In other news, SCM Press has a pretty decent sale on some books of interest, ending on 30 Sept. 2009:

• The Theology of Money (paperback), by Philip Goodchild (special sale price £13.50)
• Transcendence and Phenomenology (paperback), eds. Peter M. Candler, Jr. and Conor Cunningham (special sale price: £28.00)
• Belief and Metaphysics (paperback), eds. Peter M. Candler, Jr. and Conor Cunningham (special sale price: £28.00)
• Tayloring Reformed Epistemology: Charles Taylor, Alvin Plantinga and the de jure Challenge to Christian Belief (paperback), by Deane-Peter Baker (special sale price: £9.50)
• Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma (paperback), by Marcus Pound (special sale price: £10.00)

Second, I have begun a series of posts on Kierkegaard and Socrates over on Cynthia Nielsen’s Per Caritatem blog. The first post highlights Socrates’ importance for Kierkegaard at the end of his life, and the second post delves a bit into Kierkegaard’s “Sophistical” situation vis-à-vis the Danish Hegelian Christians of Copenhagen. I should have a third post up soon.

Glancing around his bookshelf, I noticed that he had several copies of the new edition of his The Story of God: A Narrative Theology book.  The first one came out in 1994 (with the different subtitle “Wesleyan Theology & Biblical Narrative”) and has been assigned in many undergraduate Nazarene theology departments.  However, being a computer science undergrad, I was never assigned the book, nor did I ever get around to reading it in between my forray into theology since then.  What immediately struck me was how incredibly, vastly improved the new cover of the book was.  Here it is below:

And here is a link to a picture of the old one.  As you can see, ridiculously improved.  Not only that, but it’s about one of the coolest book covers I’ve ever seen.

There is a brief but interesting write-up of the process of this cover’s creation over on the Face Out Books website.

[If I ever got into Jules Verne, this would definitely be the set to get (with covers designed by the same place), don't you think?]

I read an advanced copy of The City and The City by China Miéville and was quite impressed. This is a book that will generate a lot of talk in the coming months. The book reads like a fantasy but most assuredly is not. Miéville posits two fictional European cities that occupy the exact same geography–the exact same spot on the globe. The only thing that keeps the cities separate is the mental effort of citizens to recognize only elements of their respective cities–their fashions, buildings, foods, etc.–even if they are standing next to a citizen from the other city (whom they must “unsee”). Miéville uses so many recognizable fantasy tropes (words like alterity [my guess is that 'alterity' was not a word that began in fantasy! - Eric] and breach and cross-hatching and unsee) that you aren’t sure what he is doing until well into the story (that is if you haven’t been warned by someone who’s read it already!). The book is very good but I suspect some will wonder why Miéville created such an outlandish scenario and yet refused to make it fantasy. I think the book is a success however and that Miéville has done something unique and relevant.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Miéville’s Perdido Street Station for some time now, reading it slowly here and there since I arrived in Nottingham.  I picked it up like six years ago at San Diego’s awesome Mysterious Galaxy bookstore, where I’ve–geek-out time–met Bruce Campbell and Wil Wheaton at their respective booksignings.  It would be weird to say that Miéville’s writing is ‘haunting’; at least in Perdido Street Station, it’s more like you can smell the ichor of his prose–something every Lovecraft enthusiast should admire.  [Readers of Collapse may recognize Miéville from issue IV on 'concept horror' (none of which I've read just yet...it will have to wait till the summer)].

In any case, based on John‘s brief take, Miéville’s upcoming book sounds like something I definitely want to read.  To perhaps state something obvious, based on John’s description, the world that Miéville has set up sounds like a manichean fundamentalist version of Augustine’s two cities.  That’s obviously a bit crude, and I haven’t read it, but I really like what I’ve read of Miéville’s work thus far. 

Lastly, to further plug the Above the Convenience Store blog: if you’re into David Lynch’s work, especially Twin Peaks, then I highly recommend this blog.  It’s written by one of the co-editors of the Wrapped in Plastic magazine deadicated to analyzing all things Lynch. I used to pick this magazine up at Tower Records in San Diego, but the magazine itself has now been on hiatus for a few years.  So it’s good to see one of the main writers of that publication continue to ruminate on Lynchian things. These reflections on Greg Olson’s David Lynch: Beautiful Dark are a great place to start:

• Thoughts on David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (chaps. 1-4)
• Beautiful Dark Chapter 5: Blue Velvet
• Beautiful Dark Chapter 6: Twin Peaks Season 1
• Beautiful Dark Chapter 7: Wild at Heart

Looking at the paperback column below, these are clearly more affordably priced, although some are still a bit pricey. Those ones tend to be the larger volumes over 500-700 pages or so (e.g. The Moment and Later Writings), but there may be exceptions.

Here’s a breakdown with a price comparison chart where the paperback prices listed are the pre-order prices from Amazon. Hopefully it’s not too confusing. That being said, those viewing this post in an RSS reader like Google Reader, Netvibes, etc., may way to view this post on the blog itself because the styles may get munged.

Cover	Vol#	Title	Hardback Price $/£	Paperback List $/£	Paperback Price $/£	Release Date
	I	Early Polemical Writings	134.95* / £138.46	$35.00 / £19.95	$29.33 / £18.95	July 09 / June 21, 09†
	IX	Prefaces/Writing Sampler	$56.24 / $40.00‡ / £33.00	$29.95 / £17.95	$29.95 / £17.05	July 09 / June 4, 09
	X	Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions	$177.50* / £47.50	$24.95 / £14.95	$24.95 / £14.20	July 09 / June 4, 09
	XIII	The Corsair Affair, and Articles Related to the Writings	$500.00* / £unavail.	$29.95 / £17.95	$29.95 / £17.05	August 09 / July 5, 09
	XIV	Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review	$67.50 / $45.50 / £32.01	$24.95 / £14.95	$24.95 / £14.20	August 09 / July 5, 09
	XV	Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits	$199.99* / £unavai.	$35.00 / £19.95	$29.33 / £18.95	July 09 / June 21, 09
	XVII	Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress	$57.00 / £64.60	$45.00 / £26.95	$37.42 / £25.60	July 09 / June 21, 09
	XVIII	Without Authority	$80.00 / $42.38 / £37.95	$35.00 / £19.95	$29.33 / £18.95	July 09 / June 4, 09
	XXII	The Point of View	$75.96 / $70.00 / £64.60	$35.00 / £19.95	$29.33 / £18.95	July 09 / June 4, 09
	XXIII	The Moment and Late Writings	$83.84 / £58.90	$60.00 / £35.00	$49.55 / £33.25	July 09 / June 21, 09
	XXIV	The Book on Adler	$95.00 / $50.00 / £44.88	$40.00 / £23.95	$33.38 / £22.75	August 09 / July 5, 09
	XXV	Letters and Documents	$125.00 / $85.00 / £99.14	$65.00 / £38.95	$53.59 / £37.00	August 09 / July 5, 09
	XXVI	Cumulative Index to Kierkegaard’s Writings	$99.50 / $90.00 / £59.95	$65.00 / £38.95	$53.59 / £37.00	July 09 / June 21, 09

* Items designated with an asterisk mean that Amazon only has them “used and new from [x price]“, indicating that they don’t have any in stock and used bookstores or individual resellers are trying to scalp them at usually batshit crazy insane prices (e.g. The Corsair Affair).

† The Princeton site for Kierkegaard’s works only lists a release date in “Month Year” format whereas Amazon has more specific dates that don’t always align with these dates. The format will be “[Princeton Date] / [Amazon Date]“. We all know that Amazon’s release dates don’t really signify anything real, so take these with a grain of salt.

‡ Hardcover prices with two prices listed are for the “[New Price] / [Used Price]” where the used price is the best price available in the Amazon Marketplace.

Here is the rest of the schedule:

• 19 January – Chapter 2: “Ernst Troeltsch: The Triumph of Ideology and the Eclipse of Apocalyptic”, response by David Congdon
• 26 January – Chapter 3: “Karl Barth: Foundations for an Apocalyptic Christology”, response by John McDowell
• 2 February – Chapter 4: “Stanley Hauerwas: Apocalyptic, Narrative Ecclesiology, and ‘the Limits of Anti-Constantinianism’ “, response by John W. Wright
• 9 February – Chapter 5: “John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History”, response by Douglas Harink
• 16 February – Chapter 6: “Towards an Apocalyptic Politics of Mission”, response by James K. A. Smith
• 23 February – Concluding response by Nathan R. Kerr (although he has already been providing helpful clarifying comments already)

Also, Nate informs me that Cascade Books is still offering a 40% off discount if the book purchased through their site using the discount code “KERR40″, bringing the book down to $16.80 (significantly cheaper than Amazon).

Dave Belcher informs us that there will be a panel at this year’s Wesleyan Theological Society conference on Nate’s book as well.  Panelists include Scott Daniels, John Wright, Sam Powell, and Michael Cartwright, with Nate responding, and Dave Belcher at the moderating helm.

Paul Draper has a very good and critical review of Naturalism, which is written by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Interventions series).  The final paragraph:

Although [Goetz and Taliaferro]‘s assessment of naturalism is, in my opinion, far from complete, I would highly recommend the book to philosophy students at all levels. It would be an ideal text for a course in metaphysics or philosophy of mind or even philosophy of religion. For not only is it a very short book, which increases the likelihood that students would actually read it, but it is full of arguments that are rigorous, clear, and free of technical jargon. In addition to being accessible, these arguments provide excellent models for students to imitate in their own philosophical writing. I would also strongly recommend the book to professional philosophers, especially to naturalists. For the book is an excellent reminder that, while naturalism is unquestioned by most philosophers, there remains serious and all too often unanswered opposition to it, and the problems it faces are deep and difficult.

Not a bad book cover, either, eh?

David Burrell has a review of Michael Allen Gillespie’s newest book entitled The Theological Origins of Modernity.  The book sounds rather disappointing on Burrell’s take.  Which reminds me: I still need to finish Gillespie’s earlier work, which I’ve been told by people who have read both, is quite a bit better.  Oh here I go, getting all ‘indie’ on genealogical takes on philosophy and theology, oy.

In other news, it’s 4:30pm and the sun set about an hour ago.  I’m definitely not anywhere used to that.

Meanwhile, Peter Leithart has begun blogging the book:

• Test of Manhood
• Dark Sayings
• Hamann and Hitler

Hopefully there will be more to come; it’s a rather large book, and in the newer, weird, large-and-bulky Blackwell format (e.g., the 2nd edition of Theology and Social Theory and William Desmond’s God and the Between).

This January on the Church and Postmodern Culture blog, we hope to have a symposium on Nate’s book.  More on that later as we are still working out people to engage the book!

If you attended the Radical Orthodoxy and Process Theology panel at the 2007 AAR in San Diego, one of the interesting commonalities between the two sensibilities was an embrace of a return to metaphysics.  In 2006, the Centre of Theology and Philosophy hosted a conference called ‘Belief and Metaphysics’ (CoTP report here) around this issue (although not related to process) and subsequently published a collection of essays from the conference by the same title.

At this year’s AAR in Chicago, Nate Kerr is moderating a panel on the recently-released Belief and Metaphysics volume in the Veritas series entitled “The Return of Metaphysics: A dialogue on the occasion of the publication of Belief and Metaphysics.”  The panel is graciously sponsored by SCM Press‘ Veritas Series and The Centre of Theology and Philosophy.  Click on the poster above to see the larger version which lists all the details for the event, including the list of panelists.  If you received your AAR book in the mail this past week, you will also find these details listed on page 151. It looks to be a pretty exciting panel!

Regrettably, chances are very likely that I will not be able to attend the AAR this year because of our upcoming move to Nottingham in the fall.  We have a bit too much going on and not enough money to fly everywhere and attend everything.  However, I will be going to and presenting at this, which will be much easier to get to from Nottingham.  Still, if you can make it to the AAR, I highly encourage attendance at this this panel.  It looks to be quite interesting and a lot of fun with a good diverse response to the book.  The book itself is very diverse so we’ll see what happens!

Most book covers until recent times have been about careful text placement on usually a single-color background. To illustrate just a few examples, see, for instance, the bright red cover to the Krell-edited Basic Writings of Heidegger; the simple large text upon white of Charles Taylor’s Hegel and Modern Society; the original cover to Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom, which ups the ante a bit by applying a radial orange-yellow gradient; the highly recognizeable two-tone covers of Princeton’s Kierkegaard Writings series with SK’s portrait at the two-tone intersection. And from here, more multi-tone and pictures are introduced so that there really does not seem to be much of a limit in design any longer, outside of the usual printing costs.

Enter Continuum Press, namely, their Continuum Impacts series. These are reprints of well-known philosophical texts that have already established themselves in the history of philosophy, most of them being within the wider contintental tradition, with plenty of exceptions, theological and otherwise (Erasmus and Luther on Free Will, Barth, Schillebeeckx, Gandhi, et. al.). To see a slapdash view of all of the covers in this series, click here (after quickly extracting all the ISBN’s, I whipped up a short PHP script to display all the books in the series).

I’m curious, what do you think about the covers in this series? What say you?!

Update: Anthony has alerted me to a post he wrote three years ago on the same subject, with funny and appropriate commentary worth checking out.

My wife Tiana and I, since this last summer, have been catching up on watching LOST in all of its awesomeness.  Since buying Season 1 from my friend Mogan we have been hooked.  After borrowing Season 2 from a friend shortly thereafter, we received Season 3 on DVD for Christmas and caught up in time for Season 4 to start on January 31st.  Like my good friend Charlie, I’ve also been listening to The Official LOST Podcast and The Lost Podcast with Jay and Jack, soaking up theories about the unfolding plotline(s), listening to interviews, etc. — in other words, pretty much becoming a LOST nerd(tm).  In spite of all my fandom of the show, I do have one meta-prediction about the show.  This really won’t be a surprise to most people, but here it is:

Once LOST is over in 2010, the big reveal(s) of the plotlines are (uhm) revealed, and the denouement breathes its last breath, the following phenomena is sure to happen: people who are not invested in the storyline whatsoever will give it all away who to those who have either 1) not caught up yet to the end or 2) were intending to get around to watching the show someday.  Many people will feel cheated, but it is bound to happen in the face of such a popular show.  There will be “Now that it is all over, now what?” commentaries and Op-Eds that give away the big reveals of the end of the series and will be readily accessible to anybody not wanting to put the effort forth to watch the show (although it’s a TV show so ‘effort’ may not be the right word! maybe patience?).  People like me will probably get enormously frustrated and disappointed because we will have spent 6 seasons worth of episodes  getting invested in characters and their story-arcs only to hear people attempt to reduce these characters to some final moments that distort the heart of the characters and the story.  Inevitably, I will cry, “but it is not as simple as that!”

So my question then becomes: will LOST ultimately have a of depth beyond mere plot details that will be able to overcome the nay-saying of spoiler mongers?  Will one be able to say something like, “But what LOST is about is more than just the reveals of the plot”?  Will spoiling plot details be enough to actually “ruin” the show for somebody?  I have some thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think first.

My friends over at The Other Journal have just posted an interview with Marcus Pound, recent author of Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma in the Veritas series.  Knowing Marcus from a few conversations at various conferences (and enjoying his ability to rock out on some folk songs), his responses are as lively and enlightening as he is in person.

• Margaret Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought
• Saint Augustine, Confessions
• Saint Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana
• Saint Augustine, De Trinitate
• Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity
• Cyril Richardson (ed.), Early Christian Fathers (Library of Christian Classics)
• Edward R. Hardy (ed.), Christology of the Later Fathers (Library of Christian Classics)
• Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works
• Michael J. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction
• Michael J. Loux (ed.), Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings
• Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History
• Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity
• Graham Priest, Logic: A Very Short Introduction
  
• Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel
• David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
• John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer
• Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy
• Tim Clark and Mark Cunningham, The Prosperous Peasant: Five Secrets of Fortune & Fulfillment from the Samurai’s Temple School
  
• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
• Nick Mamatas, Move Under Ground

Memory is, for Augustine, ultimately a questin of desire, of the right intentio or affection towards that which one remembers. The well-trained memory is one in which good use is made of the “things” in one’s memory. “A character,” he says, “is only to be praised for loving passionately when what it loves deserves to be passionately loved.” He describes the threefold character of disposition, learning and practice (usus) which correspond to the threefold division of memory, understanding and will (which further corresponds to the three rhetorical functions: delighting, teaching, moving). As is typical in his treatment in De Trinitate, the third term is a combination of the first two. Thus the practice of a person’s memory, or its “use,” consists in the “use the will now makes of what the memory and understanding hold, whether it refers them to something else or whether it takes delight in them as ends in themselves.” Therefore, to remember well is to will rightly, to have the proper kind of learned disposition towards that which one remembers [pp. 61-2].

And then, with this in mind, Pete says a couple of pages later:

What follows, then, in the remaining three books of the Confessions, is no mere afterthought, as some have argued. Instead, from what we have seen so far, we are in a position now to understand Books IX-XIII as the actual activity of the memory doing its work, as the plumbing of its unfathomable and mysterious depths. Yet the locus of this activity is not only the individual mind, but the collective memory of the church. The content of that recollection is not the boyhood adventures of Augustine; it is rather the story of God’s way with the world. Thus he begins Book XI with a retelling of the account of creation in Genesis, and concludes in Book XIII with a discussion of the eternal Sabbath. That is to say, Augustine now formally situates his own personal narrative within a larger story, that which the church tells — moreover, that story in whose telling and performing the church is itself enacted [pp. 65-6].

The Nation State Project, Schizophrenic Globalization, and the Eucharist: An Interview with William T. Cavanaugh
by Ben Suriano

Really good stuff, as always, although some familiar material for those who know Cavanaugh’s stuff.  Looks like Cavanaugh also has a new book coming out called Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire.

I am no economist, but my first inclination is to say that the reason that gift/gratitude/relationship is left out of economic consideration is because modern economics itself it predicated upon an economy of lack.  The gift is one of surplus, one that in divine terms as D.B. Hart puts it in regards to Anselm, one that “exceeds every debt.”  In the gift, there is always a ‘more’ that exceeds the violence of exchange, which is also why Milbank is right to argue for the gift before the contract in our society (see his essay “Liberality versus Liberalism”).  Economic theory, if it assumed an economy of abundance (jubilee economics), would be very much more distributive, I think!