...John Brenkman Copyright © 2013 Qui Parle 2013 “ . . . wrestling with (my God!) my God” Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief john brenkman Belief’s Modernity In the tradition of Pascal, inherited religious belief is wracked by doubt and the believer is brought face to face...

... the feeling that it is known com- prehensively by the unknowable. To be named—even if the name- giver is god-like and saintly—perhaps always brings with it a pre- sentment of mourning” (RoN, 224). This experience of mourning brings the question of salvation down to the level of the history...

.... A single voice raises the clamour of being.” 4 Shortly after, Deleuze argues that Spinoza (1632–77) converted the concept of univocity to immanence: “And it is in immanence that univocity finds its distinctly Spinozist formulation: God is said to be the cause of all things in the very sense ( eo sensu...

..., God tells Adam, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”3 Here, too, the end of the story is built into its beginning. For the tempta- tion of Eden...

... — but not the imitation of nature. Rather, it is the ars infinita of God himself, specifically in the sense that this production is original, generated spontaneously, and creative, but not in the sense that this imitation created the world. "A spoon has no other exemplar except our...

... beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such as the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without différance : another name for death, historical metonymy where God’s name holds death in check. Jacques...

... for the negation of the negation of the human and the world. Alienation presupposes that there is a human subject becoming other by projecting the self into an alien reality that is either God or capital, and emancipation presupposes a struggle against this alienation. Hence the classical Trinitarian scheme...

... the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli la’ma sabach- tha’ni?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me (Matt. 27:45– 46). Filling this three- hour interim, the dark- ness, like a universal veil over the very...

... preaching the word of God and the crowd fervently respond- ing, approaching the stage, shouting and singing praises and prayers to the Lord, Tom beholds a striking detail: the "so very, very white" [ang puti-puti] countenance of the American preacher. In the face of this intense whiteness...

... functions through a disavowal of the violence that founds and maintains the world—what is needed is an immanence at once against the world and the gods that it variously attempts to combat (or, at other times, to use for its own benefit). All attempts to affirm the world must be confronted with the fact...

... of the state. Similarly, the omnipotent God of theol- ogy is analogous to the omnipotent lawgiver of jurisprudence. “It is God who established these laws in nature,” Descartes writes to Marin Mersenne, “just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom” (cited in pt, 47). God suspends nature’s law...

... could teach with reference to texts consisting of extensive, sym- bolically based rational narratives like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Hesiod’s Theogony, which are religious texts “full of gods,” but which were nevertheless considered suitable for philosophical interpretation...

... world; the theologian’s words constitute it. Or, more precisely, it is constituted by the words and actions of Christians, doing and saying what Christians say and do. The theologian describes the world and constitutes it at once by speaking true words about God. These true...

... an exemplar of THE LOGIC OF AROUSAL 5 the very manner by which one is to interact with images, especially with those visionary images, experienced in prayer, that arouse the desire toward God. Herein lies the exemplary function the sixteenth...

... The “Is-ness” or the Existence of Light is Darkness . . . That is, Darkness is the body of the “Is-ness” of Light. The Intelligence Notebooks Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider” 10 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1 Double...

... reality” that exceeds Aristotelian categories expresses his appur- tenance to the school of Christian thought that took this view: that of Father Teilhard de Chardin, whose “God of evolution” is in perfect resonance with Bergson’s evolutionary and vitalist thinking. 2. Senghor’s...

...” or a “religious attitude” that these invoked or imagined a “divine” order behind the contingencies of human history? Or was it that they muddled the distinction between secular history and what Said, paraphrasing Giambattista Vico, called “the order of God’s sacred history?” 2 The stakes of these questions may...

... Islam in Asia and North Africa; and a range of local 110 qui parle 23:1 • special dossier religions in regions around the globe. “If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”1...

... to its capacity to lead men to offend God; the envious become incapable of enjoying the gift of life, so concentrated are they on their own hatred of the Other’s life. For the Church Fathers, the sin of envy was closely linked to that of pride, or the love for one’s own...

...- perors and gods. High-speed conveyances, democratized thanks to modern transportation and digital era information technologies, promise to render everyman god-like and emperor-like: fast, ubi- quitous, autonomous, powerful, potent. Access to them is a sure mark...