Claire Dickinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 363917 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Claire Dickinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Claire |
| FAMILY NAME | Dickinson |
| SIGNATURE | DICKINSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola University Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9019-6013 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Antinomianism as the Revolutionary Impulse of Christianity
Since the Reformation, Christianity has struggled more or less openly with its inner, antinomian impulses, those revolutionary desires, or desires for a ‘permanent revolution’, that threaten to overturn the rule of all law. From Martin Luther to the Puritans of New England to today’s Evangelical ‘culture warriors’, the desire to restrain antinomian sentiments that endlessly challenge institutional orthodoxy, or even the rule of law itself, nevert…
Jesuit Spirituality for the Contemporary Pluralistic Classroom
The Jesuit ideal of striving to care for the whole person (cura personalis) forms a principle that transcends any single social, political, religious or professional context, offering educators something of a measuring stick to carry with us for the many domains in which we operate (Mesa 2017, pp. 287–366).1 As a spiritual principle, it means we must be attentive to the complexity of ourselves as much as we are sensitive to the complexities of ot…
Seeing beyond Being Seen
As biological taxonomists have only recently begun to acknowledge, humanity is stuck in a tension between its myriad social, cultural, political and religious cosmologies – its various umwelten – and the desire for rational, scientific classification. What does it mean that the rational logics of classifications that we so readily employ to recognise the reality before our eyes cannot account for the passionate attachments that exceed any categor…
Archaeology and Hauntology
It is certainly possible that we might learn to better acknowledge the spirits of our ancestors who came before us, as well as to recognize them in such ways that we also learn to embrace the 'woven density' of our own lives, our histories and our communities. By doing so, we might begin to discover that the spirits we had thought were removed from our modern, secularized world never fully left us, just as the irrationality of our humanity cannot…
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer Series
This short book delivers an overview of the most significant concepts and histories as presented in the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s magnum opus, the nine-volume Homo Sacer series. In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on sovereignty, the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, Pauline messianism, the boundary between the human and the animal, t…
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Series
Introduces the most significant concepts and histories in Giorgio Agamben’s central work The first introductory text to Giorgio Agamben’s 9-volume magnum opus, the Homo Sacer series Unpacks Agamben's central concepts, introducing them to new readers of the series and adding nuance for readers more versed in Agamben's philosophy Requiring no prior knowledge of the series, Colby Dickinson explains why Agamben’s Homer Sacer is one of the most signif…
Theorising worker–client relations in front‐line service work
This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of front‐line service workers’ experience of the worker–client relationship. It is based on a series of in‐depth interviews with non‐professionally affiliated workers in new front‐line roles in UK mental health services. The findings cover three main areas: worker motivation and orientation; the nature of the worker–client relationship; and the role played in the relationship by the structure of wo…
Agamben and the Existentialists
Introduces Agamben as an existentialist figure who takes the philosophy in a startling new direction Reveals the atheistic underbelly of Agamben’s political theology Opens new avenues of study by challenging Carl Schmitt’s appropriation of existentialism Contributors include Vanessa Lemm, Beatrice Marovich, Tom Frost and Lucas Lazzaretti While Giorgio Agamben’s work has not previously been categorised as existentialist, his work creatively repack…
Ending Christian Hegemony
This essay addresses Jean-Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” and how what Christianity proclaims through enacting a deconstruction of itself brings an end to the western, hegemonic hold that Christian imperialism has perpetuated for centuries. Nancy, for his part, takes up the name of Christianity insofar as it is a religious phenomenon that signals a trajectory of thought in the West that must be discerned as providing an “exit from re…
Locating Love Amid the Violence
To try to recover something of the religious framework that is inextricably connected to the history of apophatic thought amid the emancipatory claims of various modern nihilisms, I find it helpful to consider how contemporary philosophical views have worked steadily toward an eradication of the false sacred in our world in order to produce nothing more than an empty space that might nonetheless yield the possibility for something like a source o…
How should we suffer? Meditating on Christian responses to the problem of suffering
Despite the irreducible non-equivalence of individual experiences of suffering, there is a solidarity possible among sufferers especially during times of collective crisis. This essay focuses on the suffering of the disciple Peter in order to formulate a model for suffering that resonates deeply with other, more recent accounts. Peter’s suffering is linked with Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, as well as the work of certain German political theologi…
Personalisation, customisation and bricolage
Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage …
Theodor W. Adorno
In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz , Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration…
Fragmented, Messianic, Paradoxical, Antinomian, Revolutionary, Secular
Multiple philosophical-theological efforts in the last century, from W. Benjamin to J. Caputo, have been centered on a messianic opposition to normative structures, a challenge that invokes a long history in the West of breaking down the codes of ordered, civilized and religious society. That such an apocalyptic fervor is nothing new to the history of theology should not surprise us. What should surprise us, however, is how infrequently we are ab…
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Agamben's Coming Philosophy
Z którą teologią polityczną mamy do czynienia? Oceniając genealogię teologii politycznej i wypatrując jej przyszłości
In this essay, I examine Michel Foucault’s political contrast between the theological domains of the pastoral and the mystical, in order to note his focus on how necessity and providence are founding and legitimizing concepts of the State. Through this process I develop an analysis of how Foucault, in his critique of the historical uses of theology as a tool of pastoral power, actually points toward another form of political theology than Carl Sc…
Dwelling in Diaspora
This article aims to present Judith Butler's theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler's diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich's poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizi…
The Profanation of Revelation
This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. A…
The “Violence” of the Canon
The historical conditions surrounding the processes of forming a canon are rarely examined directly, yet it is these processes that govern the realm of religious representations and identity constructions. In light of recent critical scholarship, it is imperative to address theologically the role that the canon plays within a religious tradition. This article demonstrates the cultural necessity of canonical forms despite their “monotheistic tende…
The Divisions of Sovereignty”
Citing ‘Whatever’ Authority
This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source toward…
The Poetic Atheology of Giorgio Agamben
By utilizing the work of Giorgio Agamben, this essay examines how the poetic can exist as the last refuge of meaning in an “atheological” world, that is, one without its previous theological justifications
Tradition in the Public Square
This article reviews the book Tradition the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited by Randi L. Rashkover and Martin Kavka
Contemplating God, Changing the World
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Personalisation, customisation and bricolage
Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage …
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Dwelling in Diaspora
This article aims to present Judith Butler's theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler's diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich's poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizi…
Fragmented, Messianic, Paradoxical, Antinomian, Revolutionary, Secular
Multiple philosophical-theological efforts in the last century, from W. Benjamin to J. Caputo, have been centered on a messianic opposition to normative structures, a challenge that invokes a long history in the West of breaking down the codes of ordered, civilized and religious society. That such an apocalyptic fervor is nothing new to the history of theology should not surprise us. What should surprise us, however, is how infrequently we are ab…
Z którą teologią polityczną mamy do czynienia? Oceniając genealogię teologii politycznej i wypatrując jej przyszłości
In this essay, I examine Michel Foucault’s political contrast between the theological domains of the pastoral and the mystical, in order to note his focus on how necessity and providence are founding and legitimizing concepts of the State. Through this process I develop an analysis of how Foucault, in his critique of the historical uses of theology as a tool of pastoral power, actually points toward another form of political theology than Carl Sc…
The Divisions of Sovereignty”
Citing ‘Whatever’ Authority
This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source toward…
The outcomes of partnerships with mental health service users in interprofessional education
This paper reports findings from a 5-year evaluation (1998-2003) of a postqualifying programme in community mental health in England which made a sustained attempt to develop partnerships with service users. Users were involved in the commissioning of the programme and its evaluation, as trainers and as course members. The evaluation employed mixed methods to assess: learners' reactions to user-trainers and users as course members; changes in kno…
The outcomes of partnerships with mental health service users in interprofessional education
This paper reports findings from a 5-year evaluation (1998-2003) of a postqualifying programme in community mental health in England which made a sustained attempt to develop partnerships with service users. Users were involved in the commissioning of the programme and its evaluation, as trainers and as course members. The evaluation employed mixed methods to assess: learners' reactions to user-trainers and users as course members; changes in kno…
Tradition in the Public Square
This article reviews the book Tradition the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited by Randi L. Rashkover and Martin Kavka
Contemplating God, Changing the World
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
The Poetic Atheology of Giorgio Agamben
By utilizing the work of Giorgio Agamben, this essay examines how the poetic can exist as the last refuge of meaning in an “atheological” world, that is, one without its previous theological justifications
The “Violence” of the Canon
The historical conditions surrounding the processes of forming a canon are rarely examined directly, yet it is these processes that govern the realm of religious representations and identity constructions. In light of recent critical scholarship, it is imperative to address theologically the role that the canon plays within a religious tradition. This article demonstrates the cultural necessity of canonical forms despite their “monotheistic tende…
The Divisions of Sovereignty”
Citing ‘Whatever’ Authority
This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source toward…
The Profanation of Revelation
This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. A…
Agamben's Coming Philosophy
Z którą teologią polityczną mamy do czynienia? Oceniając genealogię teologii politycznej i wypatrując jej przyszłości
In this essay, I examine Michel Foucault’s political contrast between the theological domains of the pastoral and the mystical, in order to note his focus on how necessity and providence are founding and legitimizing concepts of the State. Through this process I develop an analysis of how Foucault, in his critique of the historical uses of theology as a tool of pastoral power, actually points toward another form of political theology than Carl Sc…
Dwelling in Diaspora
This article aims to present Judith Butler's theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler's diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich's poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizi…
Fragmented, Messianic, Paradoxical, Antinomian, Revolutionary, Secular
Multiple philosophical-theological efforts in the last century, from W. Benjamin to J. Caputo, have been centered on a messianic opposition to normative structures, a challenge that invokes a long history in the West of breaking down the codes of ordered, civilized and religious society. That such an apocalyptic fervor is nothing new to the history of theology should not surprise us. What should surprise us, however, is how infrequently we are ab…
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Theodor W. Adorno
In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz , Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration…
Personalisation, customisation and bricolage
Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage …
How should we suffer? Meditating on Christian responses to the problem of suffering
Despite the irreducible non-equivalence of individual experiences of suffering, there is a solidarity possible among sufferers especially during times of collective crisis. This essay focuses on the suffering of the disciple Peter in order to formulate a model for suffering that resonates deeply with other, more recent accounts. Peter’s suffering is linked with Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, as well as the work of certain German political theologi…
Agamben and the Existentialists
Introduces Agamben as an existentialist figure who takes the philosophy in a startling new direction Reveals the atheistic underbelly of Agamben’s political theology Opens new avenues of study by challenging Carl Schmitt’s appropriation of existentialism Contributors include Vanessa Lemm, Beatrice Marovich, Tom Frost and Lucas Lazzaretti While Giorgio Agamben’s work has not previously been categorised as existentialist, his work creatively repack…
Ending Christian Hegemony
This essay addresses Jean-Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” and how what Christianity proclaims through enacting a deconstruction of itself brings an end to the western, hegemonic hold that Christian imperialism has perpetuated for centuries. Nancy, for his part, takes up the name of Christianity insofar as it is a religious phenomenon that signals a trajectory of thought in the West that must be discerned as providing an “exit from re…
Locating Love Amid the Violence
To try to recover something of the religious framework that is inextricably connected to the history of apophatic thought amid the emancipatory claims of various modern nihilisms, I find it helpful to consider how contemporary philosophical views have worked steadily toward an eradication of the false sacred in our world in order to produce nothing more than an empty space that might nonetheless yield the possibility for something like a source o…
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer Series
This short book delivers an overview of the most significant concepts and histories as presented in the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s magnum opus, the nine-volume Homo Sacer series. In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on sovereignty, the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, Pauline messianism, the boundary between the human and the animal, t…
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Series
Introduces the most significant concepts and histories in Giorgio Agamben’s central work The first introductory text to Giorgio Agamben’s 9-volume magnum opus, the Homo Sacer series Unpacks Agamben's central concepts, introducing them to new readers of the series and adding nuance for readers more versed in Agamben's philosophy Requiring no prior knowledge of the series, Colby Dickinson explains why Agamben’s Homer Sacer is one of the most signif…
Theorising worker–client relations in front‐line service work
This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of front‐line service workers’ experience of the worker–client relationship. It is based on a series of in‐depth interviews with non‐professionally affiliated workers in new front‐line roles in UK mental health services. The findings cover three main areas: worker motivation and orientation; the nature of the worker–client relationship; and the role played in the relationship by the structure of wo…
Archaeology and Hauntology
It is certainly possible that we might learn to better acknowledge the spirits of our ancestors who came before us, as well as to recognize them in such ways that we also learn to embrace the 'woven density' of our own lives, our histories and our communities. By doing so, we might begin to discover that the spirits we had thought were removed from our modern, secularized world never fully left us, just as the irrationality of our humanity cannot…
Jesuit Spirituality for the Contemporary Pluralistic Classroom
The Jesuit ideal of striving to care for the whole person (cura personalis) forms a principle that transcends any single social, political, religious or professional context, offering educators something of a measuring stick to carry with us for the many domains in which we operate (Mesa 2017, pp. 287–366).1 As a spiritual principle, it means we must be attentive to the complexity of ourselves as much as we are sensitive to the complexities of ot…
Seeing beyond Being Seen
As biological taxonomists have only recently begun to acknowledge, humanity is stuck in a tension between its myriad social, cultural, political and religious cosmologies – its various umwelten – and the desire for rational, scientific classification. What does it mean that the rational logics of classifications that we so readily employ to recognise the reality before our eyes cannot account for the passionate attachments that exceed any categor…
Philosophy (20 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (12 works) · Theology (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Psychology (7 works)