Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

The Word Made Speculative? John Milbank's Christological Poetics

John Milbanks The Word Made Strange serves to answer many of the points raised by critics of his earlier Theology and Social Theory, in particular by developing more fully a “Trinitarian metaphysics” that take seriously the “poetic” character of human making and knowing. However, this metaphysics raises further questions regarding the underdevelopment of Milbanks Christology, Ecclesiology and Ethics. Specifically, Milbanks thin account of Jesus and the Church indicates an aversion to particularity that risks making his theology “merely speculative”, and lessens its impact on concrete Christian communities.

The Otherness of God

Writing of Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard has stated that ‘‘from beginning to end, one question occupied him: the question of God.’’ 1 In light of Certeau’s persistent attention to the writings of the sixteenthand seventeenth-century mystics, not to mention his status as a member of the Society of Jesus, such a claim seems plausible. But how can we square this claim with the view, advanced by Wlad Godzich, that Certeau’s work offers us an account of alterity that does not carry with it overtones of the sacred or transcendent— a notion of otherness that avoids reestablishing ‘‘the dominance of the religious over the rational’’ that so much postmodern thought risks— and thus fulfills the desire for what Edward Said calls a ‘‘secular criticism’’? 3 Moreover, how does Giard’s claim affect the almost exclusively secular reading of Certeau in the English-speaking world? How, if at all, does the God with whom he was allegedly occupied fit within Certeau’s heterological project, especially as this project has been appropriated in the field of cultural studies? And who is this God? Is this God-inquotation-marks, the product of discourses of the past—‘‘the universal speaking subject’’ who

Julian of Norwich—Incorporated

The fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich currently enjoys an immense popularity, both among scholars and among those interested in personal spiritual growth. This essay argues that part of the reason for Julian’s popularity is that she is read under the category “mystic,” a category constructed to disembed religious thinkers from their traditions so as to give them a universal availability, yet which finally disembodies and depoliticizes them. The essay then offers a reading of Julian’s Revelation of Love which shows that Julian’s theology is a thoroughly embodied one, highly conscious of and concerned for the body of Christian believers for whom she writes.