At the Centre for Inquiry London, Kenan Malik discusses the changing nature of taboos against blasphemy in his talk “Beyond the Sacred.” Until the abolition of the offence in 2008, blasphemy was committed in British law if there was published ‘any writing concerning God or Christ, the Christian religion, the Bible, or some sacred subject [...]

Slavoj Zizek has been hinting at a book on Hegel for forever now. It seems like it about to happen. From Zizek’s new Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadows of Dialectical Materialism : “You know what Einstein did in his relativity theory? He started with curved space as the effect of matter. So, let [...]

I finally got to listening to Slavoj Zizek’s latest lecture on the long cross-country drive home to Pasadena last week. It’s a really fascinating piece on the struggle for European legacy. As with American politics, so many European states are now characterized by a two-party system that- instead of being defined by a left and [...]

Slavoj Zizek’s speech at Occupy Wall Street. Transcript here. Ideologies at their purest: 1) Capitalism is bad, Socialism is good. Or, 2) Socialism is bad, Capitalism is good. Ideology is political drive minus fact and substance, the excrement of whatever you believe regardless of reality. I fully support the Occupy Wall Street protest. My concern [...]

Yesterday, an article I wrote on why The Debate About Adam and Eve Has Nothing To Do With Adam and Eve posted at Spencer Burke’s site. It generated a few discussion points on which I want to comment further on. A friend pointed out that this is really a question of “whose authority” (in which [...]

All quotes come from Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity The most interesting and unsettling use of Zizek’s theology is the way he deploys dialectical, Hegelian negation to create a theory of atonement without a God. His thesis is that Christianity, as a fictional metanarrative, provides the ultimate justification [...]

Update (1/9/12): new lecture here. Update (6/16/11): download even more Zizek audio I uploaded here. Several of you have asked for more resources on Slavoj Zizek’s philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. I’m only a few months into studying him, but have really been challenged by his perspective. Next on my reading list is his The Parallax [...]

Over the past six months, I’ve had an increasing interest in psychoanalytic theory in application to theological anthropology. Psychoanalysis in this way combines my interests in anthropology, European postmodern philosophy, theology, psychology, linguistic theories, and studies in Christian Fundamentalism.  I posted here on Jurgen Motlmann’s use of Freud to describe religious behavior and atonement theorem [...]

On Thursday, March 3rd, the nation opened its news feeds and collectively wished we didn’t have a first amendment, as the Supreme Court upheld the free speech rights of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. These are the bastards that go about protesting soldiers’ funerals, holding colorful “God Hates Fags” signs, and reminding us [...]

“Christianity is not fundamentally hermeneutical but rather involves placing into question our various religious and political interpretations of reality. In other words, Christianity should not be approached as offering a thick interpretation of reality, an interpretation that would commit us to embracing a certain cosmology or anthropology. Rather, the fundamental Christian event involves exposing the contingency [...]