
#971: October 2-3, 2024
Knowledge Fight
Hollywood's Celebrity Culture Unmasked
This chapter explores the contrasting personas of Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless, focusing on Sorbo's controversial public behavior and Lawless's diverse career. The discussion criticizes sensationalized celebrity gossip, particularly bizarre claims about blood-drinking rituals, and reflects on the disillusionment with Hollywood culture. It contrasts the rise of faith-based films with the perceived decline of mainstream Hollywood, highlighting the absurdities and challenges faced by independent filmmakers.
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Speaker 1
I'm grabbing my son's body, which it turns out phenomenologically, that sort of insider experience. I've never held a dead body, but I can't imagine it feels much different than holding a body that has lost consciousness, right? Maybe just this sheer, there is no muscle resistance that I experienced is terrifying, right? And for anybody, especially when it's your fiber profile. So without even thinking, there wasn't a reflection, there was no decision in either a ingredient or a, you know, speech act theory sense. It was simply, I found myself screaming, Jesus helped my son. I don't think I cried out to the God of philosophy, right? I wasn't thinking, cause us to eat, help my son. I think I was crying out to the God of the Scriptures. The God that for me is present when I take communion in my churches, you know, the God who is present in the worship services when I'm playing drums and it's not just a matter of getting the agent of a tripe, right? Whatever that is, that's I think the God I cried out to. Here's my word. I often wonder when I go to philosophy of religion conferences and I try to be hard and maybe as the conversation goes on, I'll try to defend this a little bit more strongly. I try really hard to say that the analytic continental divisions and philosophy of religion in particular are not things we need to even mess with overcoming anymore. It's just stuff we should ignore and start drawing on whatever resources seem helpful for the questions we ask. And so that's why I call it mash up philosophy of religion, right? She's mashed up, drawn, whatever makes sense, do the best work we can and answer your questions. That said, when I have these conferences, I rarely think to myself the God about whom we are talking mainly as Christian philosophers, right? Which I had mentioned last night is a problem in all sorts of ways and something we need to also find ways to overcome. But I'm pretty sure the God about whom we speak as philosophers is rarely the God might cry out when my son was limping my arms. That seems like a disaster somehow. And yet it seems like if it's something we bring more closely together, then we've got two worries. We have the onto theological worry, but now the God about whom we speak in philosophy is the God of scriptures, which means we've got philosophical categories overlaid on theological discourse. And so we're never actually now speaking about the God of scriptures, we're only ever speaking about the constructed discourse that's offered in philosophical communities. Oops. I guess that's one worry. So on to the other worry though, is the worry I have about analytic theology, if you're familiar with this movement in recent years. And my worry there is that philosophy of religion really does just become theology. And again, my reason for worrying about that is because I have too much respect for theologians. I think there's a different kind, as Marilynne thought that a great job of saying earlier, there's a different kind of immediacy to the evidential sets, the ecclesial, revelation, biblical, whatever it is, authorities can operate in theological discourse within immediacy that they just can't in philosophy. And I think should. So I'm an officer in the society of Christian philosophers. And yet I very publicly stated, I think Christian philosophy's bad strategy for philosophy and religion right now, precisely because Christian philosophy has itself become the power discourse in philosophy of religion. So we don't any longer need to in some speak from our Christian's 30 points, because when we do this, what we're usually saying is let's ignore the starting points of all those non-Christians, right? So it becomes the very sort of problematic discourse that all of us on the panel want to resist. So I don't know what to do. So it's all I have to say, it seems like somehow the philosopher I've got to speak it up to God that I speak to, I think, when I cry out my son's laying in my arms. And yet if I do that, I think I may necessarily engage in either law and theology or just theology in a way that makes philosophy no longer something to match. So I don't know what to do relative to that, but that's where I find myself right now wrestling with what is the future of philosophy of religion. I don't know. Let me add another thing. I think I said that the letter I suppose is a really important source, turning kind of philosophy in the direction of it's difficult beginning. But I think that that's that's we need to add that first of all, Kierkegaard himself. I mean Kierkegaard is one of himself as a religious author. And he has his, you want to find what was said that he's not trying to create a new philosophical system. But he revolutionized direction of philosophy. I think everybody who came on the scene in 20th century kind of philosophy had come under the impact of Kierkegaard, who's thinking was deeply difficult. And then even in someone like Heidegger, this way it's interesting when Heidegger, my point is that Heidegger talked about correcting theology, which he certainly did. He was directing it in terms of being time. But being in time was pretty much the ontologization of Augustine's confessions. He gave of course on St. Augustine's confessions that was published about 20 years ago. And we translated it into English and published it in the Amisseries. Translated by one of your students. Yes, Thomas continues. Any general. No, of course, on St. Augustine. It was a two-paster course. Yeah, the question was on St. Paul. What Heidegger has to say about time, which deeply influenced what I said at that time, which you are hearing today, comes from a gloss that Heidegger made when the first us humans about not knowing the day in the hour and not trying to count it up with calendar time, but being inwardly transformed and ready. The structure of Heidegger, that very scriptural, new testament, sense of temporality. And we wrote Quisro's lectures on time and consciousness. And he turned them into ontology. So that you would go to a very secular meeting of kind of philosophers or take the strike sector. You just go to the reading of kind of philosophers, the society of phenomenology, sense of philosophy. Yeah, people are talking about the temporality of human existence in a way that is at the bottom of Paul Lyon. And the whole other, which is at bottom, letting us and very Jewish. And not knowing the Paul or the the Hebrew scriptures that were behind it. So I think that experiential, biblical sense and scriptural understanding of God was foundational. I once wrote a little piece of history that every single one of those people had a degree of theology. Five people who founded the terminology, who founded the philosophy of all Heidegger's theology. And some of them had pronounced it, or denounced it, but they all started starting to be out. But this might be obvious. One about the say, I think the distinction between the God of philosophers and the God of the Bible, however we're putting it, is certainly fundamental to a postmodern philosophy of religion and the ways by which people have tried to address the problem of ontology, or to redress the problem of ontology. But that's not to say that somehow the biblical conception of God, or the biblical portrayal of God, is unconditional. I mean that that too is a condition, construction. That can be deconstructed as well. So I mean, just because one is able to make that distinction, it doesn't sort of get you out of the fix that I think we've been trying to describe over the last couple of days when it comes to speaking of God. So I have a question for Jeff and Jack. Meryl and I both, I think, at least hinted in Meryl didn't correct me if I misunderstood you on this. At least hinted toward the idea that the difference in philosophy and theology, though absolutely constructed, there's no, you know, sui generous distinction in play. These are histories, you know, so in this case, Jack had reviewed, it's not a meaning claim, it's a history claim. But one of the histories, and a very prominent one that differentiates philosophy of theology, is as a matter of the kind of eventual authorities operative in the two different discursive communities. One has something like capital R revelation, something like ecclesial authorities that operate. One has something like this thing called reason that then shows up with all the sub bouquets and ages and S's. And yet, if something like that history is right, I guess I wonder why radical theology counts as theology. If Jeff was right last night to say it has no relation to an ecclesial or revelation or biblical authority structure, but it's independent of this. Why not call this something like, you know, I'm thinking here of like its relationship to, but sometimes it's called the critical theories of religion. You know, it seems to me that there's an awful lot going on in the sort of medic critique, especially Jeff in your paper, that sounds a lot to me. Like a just a very substantive and important supplement to people like Russ McCutchen and Craig Martin and John C. Smith. I know you made some reference to it. So why not in some sense identify with that tradition and radicalize it, rather than identifying with a tradition historically defined by authority appeals that are now being rejected, which we've seen during tradition. Is that really quickly? That's going to be the last redirect. You can answer that, but we're going to have over time. So this is going to be the last sort of thing. So I do think something is critical theory of religion, but I'm not interested in that so much as I am interested in what the American original constructive theology. That's what I that's going to do. Now in a simpler day, we call that philosophical theology. I would rather call it. I heard the expression not theology, but theoprolytics says, I think it's a what what I'm doing is a is a phenomenology of our experience of what's going on in the name of God. I also this is what I like about Hegel. I deny any strict distinction between reason and revelation. And I think our revelation what we're calling revelation is a response to the unconditional that addresses us, which takes the form of religious narratives and metaphors and metamomies and parables and it's kind of special discursive resources and practices. Whereas, you know, process is a different sort of thing. I don't think I think the undermining that is some kind of phenomenology. Religious discourse is giving word and practice to an address that is not a matter of a divine revelation to us and from above. We could have never gotten it on a it's not it's different from radical discourse, not because it's supernatural, but because it's about it's a poetics. It's a poetics of the experience of the unconditional that is not the matter of the propositions. Okay, so we can literally go forever here. I know and somebody actually wants to go forever here. We have to actually clear out a place at some point. So briefly, recommendations for the injury, especially Malibu and Aaron, you mentioned a couple of names earlier and then Merrill and Jack, whatever you think, we just down the line recommendations to read papers, books, doesn't even matter what do we think they should be reading in a contemporary context for this discussion. Nice. So my recommendations are actually going to sound a lot like that. I would say if you want to Introduction to what postmodern hermeneutics is pretty much all about. I highly recommend Merrill's book, a huge community, which rationality, I think it's fantastic and and does a great job of getting them locating this in the context of theological discourse. If you want to see an excellent account of how a kind of Doritian notion, not only maybe what God could mean, but also what justice could mean as applied in some practical way. I think Jack's book, what would you just deconstruct still stands as a very good example of what that can be. As a little bit of a step back from the specific context, a book that Bruce Benson and I recently wrote came out last year. I actually think it is, I hope, a good place to go. If you want an introduction to basically the tradition of French phenomenology, to what we're all appealing in various ways, sometimes referred to as theological term and French phenomenology, specifically people like Derrida, Levenon, Sainry, Cartien, Monion. Bruce Benson and I wrote this book simply called The New Phenomenology, A Philosophical Introduction. It's geared toward basically graduate students or professional analytic philosophers. That's the audience. It's people who don't know this material but are interested in it, and we try to present it in a way that is written as much as possible in a kind of analytic propositionally sort of way, which I'm sure makes Jack-ish. But we did it that way precisely because we were trying to, in this case, not bridge two different discursive communities, but bridge the kind of commitments that people like us hold to the kinds of strategies that other people am operate by. So, my dad is reading. I'm terribly disappointed that I didn't get to answer his question. It's just really occasion to put a plug in for an unpublished book, the radical theology that I hope will be coming out in the not-too-distance future, in which I... I hope it was very helpful. We're working on it. So, I mean, I try to make the claim that radical theology is a discernible tradition of thought with its own lineage. And I think that's... it's not an argument or really a case that's been made and I try to make it there. So, we'll be on the lookout for that. From Alibu, I would say that to the starting point for most people was what should we do with our brains? And that there she kind of articulates a real kind of radical philosophy of freedom based on a material sense of embodiment that I think is really intriguing and suggests some interesting socio-political implications to that. If you're interested at all in the kind of connection I'm trying to make between Malibu's work and plasticity and liberation theology, I think the book to look to is changing difference in which she interrogates kind of prevailing thought within gender theory and feminist thought and really kind of takes on both Gerida and Butler in that book. I think it's really... it's very accessible. There's a chapter in there where she kind of situates herself specifically in reference to Colin Hegel and Gerida and put those differences in critical relation. Now, I want to begin with the platform. My own latest book, Kierkegaard's concept of faith. But Jack has mentioned the importance of posteral as background for all of these discussions and has mentioned Gerida's writing about posteral. Leveinaz has an important book on posteral, one of his... in a sense he introduced posteral to the French. And I'm surprised that only moments ago, Marion's name was mentioned for the first time and we've gotten this far without mentioning him. But he's certainly a major figure in the discussion that we are having and he has a book in which he takes off from posteral and tells us how we need to revise posteral in order to do what needs to be done. It's called reduction and givenness. It's not the most interesting book of Marion's, but it's certainly fundamental and important. And any of his writings, but especially the essay on the saturated phenomenon, which is now located in a lot of many different places, it's appeared. That would be something that would be very important to look at. He's an author that deserves more of a place in this discussion than we have given him this weekend. The clearest expression I've ever been able to give to all this stuff from here and stuff. My homework is what would you just think and strive for. So it keeps on keeping on you. It's being used in shared courses and stuff. If you actually went here specifically the ridian version of this thing we're calling it, in the plainest language that I have. That's it. If you want a more popular voice who is done underestimated and think that he's just screwing around. But great Peter Rollins is trained and he puts things in a sort of conversational way that makes you, I think he's not to be taken too seriously. He puts things clearly that are aimed specifically at people who can't spend their whole life trying to figure out what these are all means. If you want to wear sophisticated academically oriented survey of what's going on contemporary flanfta, flanfta religion, what's Koreanish authors book? It's modern politics. Everybody. The book on postmodern apologetics. Modern apologetics. That's it. That's for an academic audience and it's a more technical account. Amazing survey of the field and she has gone for her that she is trying to go. She was like, this thing was a question from my left. If you also want a very much more technical but very focused debates that is the sort of stuff that maybe Meryl and I sort of in various ways of representing and Jeff and Jeff are in various ways representing as sort of at least two different options within deconstructive philosophy religion. Stephen Minster and I put together a book called re-examining deconstruction and determinate religion. And in that, Jeff has a very, I think it's actually the best, Jeff, summary of your thought that I've ever read in a technical way. He cashed out different versions of postmodernism. Meryl has an essay in there where he's also responding to sort of defending the recall religion with religion. So that also I think is a very technical but very focused attempt to do the kind of conversations we've been having here in a little bit more, I think, feisty. Just in case you don't know, the best introduction to Derrida's thought is Jack's book on the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida would probably tell you that if you were here. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We have the audience. And also everyone really came out tonight last night for Rieger's discussion. So thank you, my employees as well.
In this installment, Dan and Jordan check in to find Alex enjoying a rare moment of euphoria, reflecting on the VP debate, and interviewing a demigod.