David Newheiser, Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), pp. ix + 177. £75.00/$99.99.

This essay seeks to contribute to revolutionary understandings of time through an examination of Derrida's 1993 book Sauf le nom, and the poet and mystic Angelus Silesius, whom Derrida reads in this book. The essay counters Martin Hägglund's claim that deconstruction and negative theology are fundamentally opposed to one another by tracing the work of impoverishment in Silesius's poetry. The essay then employs this understanding of impoverishment to deconstruct the concept of desire in Hägglund's 2008 book Radical Atheism, proposing as an alternative to this concept a ‘faith of revolution’ that is tied to a certain understanding of the future.

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The AI Creation Meme: A Case Study of the New Visibility of Religion in Artificial Intelligence Discourse

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel11050253 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (5) ◽

pp. 253 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Beth Singler

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Human Hand ◽

Cultural Artefact ◽

Religious Imagery ◽

The Future ◽

Secular Age ◽

Post Humanism

Through a consideration of examples of the AI Creation Meme, a remix of Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo featuring a human hand and a machine hand nearly touching, fingertip to fingertip, this article will tackle the religious continuities and resonances that still emerge in AI discourse in an allegedly ‘secular age’. The AI Creation Meme, as a highly visible cultural artefact appearing in a variety of forms and locations, will be analyzed and discussed for its religious, apocalyptic, and post-humanist narratives, along with reference to earlier work on the New Visibility of Religion—specifically, Alexander Darius Ornella’s consideration of the New Visibility of Religion and religious imagery of the 2006 film, Children of Men. Work that outlines the aspects of critical post-humanism, speculative post-humanism, and transhumanism in relation to the contemporary post-secular age will also be addressed to expand on the implicit apocalyptic messages of the AI Creation Meme. Such a consideration of repeating and remixed imagery will add to the scholarly conversation around AI narratives and the entanglements of religion and technology in our imaginaries of the future.

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Whitman and Democracy: The “Withness of the World” and the Fakes of Death

Secular Lyric ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823279715.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

John Michael

Keyword(s):

William James ◽

The World ◽

The Future ◽

Secular Age

Extending the reading of metonymy in the previous chapter to enchain the figure of the reader as the future presence of Whitman’s poem, this chapter also considers Whitman’s vexed relationship to particularity and to the ethics of democracy in a secular age. I argue that this remains an ethics of alterity not identity, an ethics of the surface and of the limits that surfaces pose when considering alterity. Whitman emerges as the poet of democratic problematics rather than the simple singer of democracy or the word en masse. The modernity of his voice emerges in his consistent refusal to allow meaning to reduce alterity, an alterity that in a secular age is the primary fact of what William James called the withness of life.

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The Future of a People

One People? ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781874774006.003.0009 ◽

1993 ◽

pp. 196-228

Author(s):

Jonathan Sacks

Keyword(s):

A Value ◽

Religious Idea ◽

The Future ◽

Secular Age

This chapter reflects on the value of Jewish unity. Unity is, as it always was, a religious value: a fact of covenant, a mutual commitment and faith. That it has become problematic should therefore occasion no surprise. It is a symptom of the tenuous hold of religion over the modern Jewish mind. But that it remains as a value is perhaps the most telling evidence that Jewry has not yet abandoned its religious roots. Habits of thought, senses of obligation, and gestures of action can persist long after the beliefs which gave them cogency have lost their hold. The concept of Jewry as ‘one people’ is a religious idea; surviving in a secular age, it is in need of resuscitation. The chapter then considers Jewish self-understanding, covenantal dualism, and the importance of inclusivism. Inclusivism is a statement of Jewish ecology: of the complex totality of Jewish peoplehood.

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