Daniel Boscaljon

Part 1 of a 3 part essay, this defines Idolatrous Masculinity as a synthesis of Mary Daly, Kate Manne, and Paul Ricoeur to read critically and commercially cinematic trends in 2017 and 2018, arguing for a theological foundation to the success of the #metoo movement.

This chapter argues for a radical interpretation of agnosticism. A commitment to the radical theological project of unveiling the consequences of the death of God in culture, creating new languages appropriate to our situation, should welcome a theological enterprise that largely brackets the focus on God and instead makes primary the religious experiences and human possibilities open to those who remain oriented to the question of God that they nonetheless desire remain unanswered.

Within Christian traditions, the philosophical tends to drown out the potentiality of the poetic as a mode of thinking theologically. This essay examines Emily Dickinson's approach to defining ‘faith’, in part because the resulting agnosticism is quite fascinating, and in part to make space for the possibility of expanding the margins of the liberal theological tradition. By incorporating the everyday and the unknown into her poems, and by emphasizing the unknowable instead of the definite, Dickinson provides her readers with an experience of faith that remains simultaneously within – and a challenge to – other forms of Christian liberal theology.

Rather than bemoaning the influence of digital technologies over our intimate lives as part of the secular world, this essay explores how our current situation discloses possibilities for love. I begin with an exploration of a secular anthropology, building on Taylor’s work in A Secular Age, pausing to consider how this anthropology exacerbates the difficulties involved in sharing oneself with another. I then turn to consider Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that community involves an interruption of our isolated selves, an interruption that grasps us without our invitation. I next consider Irigaray’s writing to deepen Nancy’s insight, framing love as a sense of incompletion that dismantles our everyday being-in-the-world. I show how this possibility for immanent love has advantages over traditional conceptions of love as requiring a transcendent third entity, and conclude with this definition’s implications for Christianity.

[T]he kernel of reality is horror, horror of the Real, and what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the Real. Slavoj Žižek (1997: 22) ... The opening of HP Lovecraft's short story 'The Call of Cthulhu' (1928) offers a ...

At present the battle over who defines our future is being waged most publicly by secular and religious fundamentalists. Hope and the Longing for Utopia offers an alternative position, disclosing a conceptual path toward potential worlds that resist a limited view of human potential and the gift of religion. In addition to outlining the value of embracing unknown potentialities, these twelve interdisciplinary essays explore why it has become crucial that we commit to hoping for values that resist traditional ideological commitments. Contextualized by contemporary writing on utopia, and drawing from a wealth of times and cultures ranging from Calvin's Geneva to early twentieth-century Japanese children's stories to Hollywood cinema, these essays cumulatively disclose the fundamental importance of resisting tantalizing certainties while considering the importance of the unknown and unknowable. Beginning with a set of four essays outlining the importance of hope and utopia as diagnostic concepts, and following with four concrete examples, the collection ends with a set of essays that provide theological speculations on the need to embrace finitude and limitations in a world increasingly enframed by secularizing impulses. Overall, this book discloses how hope and utopia illuminate ways to think past simplified wishes for the future.

I wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter concerning "Fight Club" and post-secular theological communities.

People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.

I contributed the introduction and an essay for this book.

In Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in a Secular World, Daniel Boscaljon takes up the contemporary challenges to faith by skepticism and secularism. He proposes a model of faith for believers and unbelievers alike―a passionate agnosticism―that is rooted in a skeptical consciousness. Skepticism and faith are structurally similar, he writes, in that they share an "unknowing" quality. The author argues that vigilance―the act of keeping watch, a spiritual practice in its own right―is as necessary a precondition for the structure of faith as it is for the structure of skepticism. A suspension in uncertainty and an openness to possibility require vigilance, he attests, if faith and skepticism are to avoid the often dogmatic tendencies of both theism and atheism to cling to their own brands of certainty and knowledge.

Boscaljon has three aims: to expand the current, post-theistic definitions of God for greater relevance to human beings on an individual and existential level; to integrate skepticism into faith so that it will restore the importance of faith to current theology and recover it from anti-intellectual bias; and to conceptualize the vigilance of faith in such a way that can provide a vocabulary for distinguishing "good faith" from "bad faith." He offers a variety of cultural examples ranging from film to poetry to represent a life of faith and to show how its components come together in practice. As an alternative to the prevailing fundamentalisms in today's world, his book proposes a paradigmatic understanding of faith in which theism, atheism, and agnosticism refuse to differ.