Critical reflections

Abstract

David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age appeared at the threshold to a year in which “hope” has become particularly elusive—or worse, laughable. Like 2020 itself, pandemics and politics have rendered hope a punchline. I remember one acquaintance remarking, all the way back inApril, that she was feeling much better now that she had “given up hope.” I remember this because it rang true to me at the time. I wonder how she feels now? As I write this, it’s 4:10pm, and the sun has already set over Massachusetts. The resurgence of the virus hangs like a toxic fog over the impending winter season as a yet-unconceded election settles like a terminal diagnosis on an ailing body politic. It’s a good thing that Newheiser’s book re-positions “hope” alongside deconstruction and negativity—in short, alongside the very gestures of giving up or letting go. Anything short of this would have risked losing my attention—itself an elusive commodity in 2020. Perhaps the most honest praise I can give this excellent book is that its argument has stuck with me during the latter half of this year, since I first read it in July. I am a theologian by training and committed to the claim that the truth-value of theological discourse is tied to the lives it illumines, embedded as they are in peculiar material conditions. Theology for us is nothing without us, its readers. It is an empty cloth without bodies to wear it. This approach has the effect of tipping hierarchical negotiations between familiar taxonomic categories like biblical, systematic, constructive, and historical. It refuses to restrict the power of theology to temporal periods or particular communities of practice. It focuses on the relationships forged among texts and people, ancients and moderns, the putatively faithful and the putatively faithless, and the imaginative possibilities these relationships engender. Newheiser’s book shares this sensibility, moving as it does from Dionysius to Derrida in order to relate one of the cardinal theological virtues to the tantalizing prospect of a negative political theology in a present-time when secularity—whatever it may be—feels familiar and unavoidable. Newheiser has essentially sewn an argument from his own vantage, shaped by these cross-disciplinary debates and cross-historical sources, and then stepped out of the argument so that his readers can inhabit it, perhaps better able to make sense of things. Hope in a Secular Age should be recommended for its fresh contribution to niche debates from a generation ago over the relationship between Derridean deconstruction and negative theology, not least contributing captivating treatments of little-known and newly translated pieces by Derrida. Along the way, it also recombines sources that recast the basic assertions of Schmittian political theology. Schmitt’s readers will know that there is a structural and historical analogy between