Second Saturday Conversation – April 9, 2022

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Second Saturday Conversation – Does Religion Have a Future?

All sessions are recorded and can be found a few days after they happen by clicking on the Second Saturday link at the top of the website and all sessions are in Pacific time.

April 9 Discussion – Telling the story again anew

We will be holding these conversations on Zoom. Please register once per household to receive a link for the event with login information. This link will be sent the day before the event.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945, described the possibility of a “religionless Christianity.” In modernity, he said, we have come to realize that “everything gets along fine without God.” “The world has come of age,” and humankind has attained its “adulthood.” As humankind becomes more and more, God becomes less and less, like the last fading smile of the Cheshire cat (Julian Huxley). This puts religion in the position of defending itself by trying to return humankind to its pre-modern adolescent dependence where it can exploit human weakness. Against this, Bonhoeffer’s proposal is, “Before God and with him we live without God.” Where Bonhoeffer spoke of “religionless” Christianity, and Bultmann of “demythologizing” it, Tillich criticized its “supernaturalism.” Together they laid the foundation of radical theology. They demystified religion and treated it as finite, fallible human articulation of the mystery of our lives. Taking these groundbreaking insights as his point of departure, Jack Caputo will offer an analysis of future of “religion” and of its uneasy relationship to “radical theology.” For Jack, the two are not antagonists – once theology is deprived of its supernaturalist illusions, radical theology is not viewed as proposing another, competing religion trying to replace the confessional traditions. The confessional religious bodies are the only ones that “exist,” under the concrete historical conditions of space and time, while radical theology is their inner disturbance, an inner restlessness, reminding them of the unconditional from which they spring. Without radical theology, the confessional traditions would reify, rigidify, mystify – but without the confessional traditions, radical theology would be deprived of one of its most familiar and accessible expressions and find other opportunities to make itself felt, like art. The question is whether that in fact is what is taking place, as religion makes itself increasingly unbelievable, more and more the shelter of the undereducated and reactionary. The point of deconstruction is to give things a future, and question is whether “religion” has a future, or even deserves to have a future, or maybe it is time to move on.

NOTE TO READERS: The above is dense and highly informative. But as my friend and colleague Jeff Creswell said we don’t need PhD’s to wonder aloud about all this. We at Second Saturday Conversation have also drawn on the likes of Kermit the Frog to help us navigate murky waters as well. We are all on a learning curve here. It is a great place to be. Join us.

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