Jeff Robbins

"The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Clayton and Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively."
-- Santiago Zabala 

"This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality."
  -- Ward Blanton

"Jeffrey W. Robbins has his finger on the pulse of current events. Radical Democracy and Political Theology comes as a welcome contribution to a very lively, very fresh conversation in (and surprisingly between) the fields of political philosophy and theology. It refuses the conservatism of most theologians who have weighed in on these matters, the neo-liberalism of their progressive counterparts, and the obstinate secularism of many political philosophers." — Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

"Jeffrey W. Robbins seeks to renew political theology by pulling it away from its conservative roots and giving it a democratic foundation. In the process, he shows democracy itself has to be rethought and radicalized. A fascinating and timely project." — Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire, Multitude: War and Democracay in the Age of Empire, and Commonwealth

"Jeffrey W. Robbins here develops a supplement to radical theology it has otherwise lacked, namely, a correspondingly radical politics. In sparkling, clear prose, he suggests this is to be found in a radicalized form of democracy, one freed from the shackles of modern liberalism and the last traces of transcendent sovereignty. A timely, distinctive, and provocative contribution to the ongoing debate on the role and nature of political theology today." — Gavin Hyman, University of Lancaster

This paper provides a literary analysis of Yann Martel's novel, "The Life of Pi." Specifically, it considers why it makes the claim that it is a story that will make you believe in God. What does this claim say about the nature of contemporary religious belief? To address this question, the paper draws on religious theorists Steve Bruce and Marcel Gauchet.

This short article is part of a a special issue of American Book Review on "the secular." Robbins points to the 20th century Catholic writer Thomas Merton as inspiration and guide for his understanding of what it means to be a secular writer.

... John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, each in their turn, stand as representative voices of these distinct, though profoundly interrelated, modes of thinking through, and thinking about, the relation of religion to society and the continued viability of theological thinking. ...

What is Enlightenment? At the end of the age of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant was asked this question. His answer: enlightenment is the release from self-imposed tutelage; it is the release that comes through the daring to know (1). Enlightenment as release, however, as Kant ...

This short article is part of a a special issue of American Book Review on "the secular."  Robbins points to the 20th century Catholic writer Thomas Merton as inspiration and guide for his understanding of what it means to be a secular writer.

In the span of a few years there was a veritable fl ood of best-selling books propounding what has come to be termed the 'new atheism. ' Taken together in sum, the new atheists tell us religion has been one of the principal causes of human suff ering, that it has led to violence, and that it promotes extremism. In addition, the religious mindset thwarts the rationalistic approach to the world and human problem solving, allowing untestable and unsupported mythological stories to serve as explanations for natural phenomena. And even more, when actually examining what religious believers believe when they attest to their faith in God or in sacred scripture, they are riddled with contradictions that should either outrage the mind or off end moral sensibilities. Plain facts told in the most provocative style, the new atheists seized on the cultural angst felt by many of those who felt left out or beaten down by the cultural warriors on the Right and who worried that the two successive terms of President George W. Bush set the United States on a perilous path towards theocracy. But when examining their central claims—not to mention the public discussion that surrounded their publications—one has to ask whether anyone is really surprised to learn that the historic faiths are guilty of self-contradictions, that religious fanatics are prone to violence, and that all religions have a human origin? Th ere was a time when these observations were truly radical and provocative. But between then and now a gulf of religious scholarship and critique has transpired, heightening our awareness and forcing any religious devotee not only to learn the truths of his or her tradition, but also to rethink the nature of religious truth. Most (with the exception of fundamentalists) would now concede that religions are true not in the same way that science or mathematics are true, but more in line with the way a Picasso portrait conveys a subjective truth that belies the merely representational. For instance, except for the most literal-minded, the Bible is not proven untrue or unreliable because it has two contradictory stories of creation in the fi rst two chapters of the Book of Genesis, or because it

This article sketches out five theses of radical theology to contribute to a vision of the future of theology. Radical theology emerged out of the Death-of-God theology of the 1960s, as well as some forms of liberation theology. These theologies challenge the orthodoxy of most traditional forms of theological and religious reflection. Here the authors, who are part of the conversation of radical theology in the United States and elsewhere, sketch out five theses: that radical theology should be postsecular, postliberal, a version of political or liberation theology, an onto-theology and an eco-theology. Each of these terms, however, needs to be qualified with a difference that distinguishes them from more common understandings of these terms. Finally, we argue that radical theology should be materialist in a non-reductionist way that reconfigures but does not simply dismiss our ideas about God, humanity, religion and the world. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

With Gianni Vattimo's late collaborative works with Santiago Zabala, Vat-timo is proving to be not only a philosopher of emancipatory hermeneutics but also one who is making his own distinct contribution to liberation philosophy. This article critically explores Vattimo's liberationist weak thought in the context of the New Mate-rialisms. Though Vattimo's post-metaphysical hermeneutics lacks the linkage with the natural sciences and eschews the development of a political ontology, which are both characteristic of the New Materialisms, his deliberate reactivation and rehabilitation of Marx by way of Heidegger eventuates in an expressed preferential option for the poor. This animating concern with what Vattimo and Zabala term " the discharge of capitalism " restores the original animating spirit of Marx's dialectical materialism and thus makes the political dimension latent in materialist thought explicit and provides a new species of the New Materialisms.

This paper chronicles the dissolution of theology that takes place within 20th century protestant thought, which prepares the way for a new way of speaking got theology as a "strategy of intervention" or an "experiment in desire" befitting a religiously diverse world.

This paper provides a literary analysis of Yann Martel's novel, "The Life of Pi."  Specifically, it considers why it makes the claim that it is a story that will make you believe in God.  What does this claim say about the nature of contemporary religious belief?  To address this question, the paper draws on religious theorists Steve Bruce and Marcel Gauchet.

This is an editorial introduction for a special issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory on "The Politics of Fright."  Drawing on the Tillichian distinction between fear and anxiety, this paper makes a distinction between the politics of fear and the politics of fright, showing how the latter weds a neo-conservative political agenda with a fundamentalist religiosity.

This paper poses the questions of whether theological thinking is still valuable and viable in the postmodern age.  Using Schleiermacher as its inspiration, it sides with Gianni Vattimo over Merold Westphal in the contemporary debate about nature of religious belief and theological reflection.  It argues that a proper non-dogmatic theology is a form of thinking that can proceed with or without God.