Fodge-ogs and HedgeOxes

MY ACADEMIC HISTORY has been a hodgepodge of what some might consider incongruous parts, and I have been pulled between the constituents of that history. In college, I remember being struck by the differences between two courses addressing the “problem of evil”: in one, a religion professor assigned complex Jewish reflections on the absence of God in the Shoah; in another, an analytic philosopher of religion offered an array of distinctions I found instructive yet difficult to grasp. I wanted to bring these traditions together, but my fumbling attempts often left one side or the other disappointed. That may happen again in this article, but I am glad for the chance to reflect on the relationship between the dis-ciplines of philosophy and theology. Debating the merits of “analytic theology ” is challenging: whether you are about it depends heavily on how you define the terms in question, and perhaps also on whether the philosophy of religion, mind, action, etc. you may have read lately has inspired optimism! My main suggestion here is that insofar as it protests bad habits and misconceptions in aca-demic theology I am happy to join the analytic theological chorus—but what theology needs is not more modifiers, movements, or parties but to be more forthrightly and less defensively itself (homeless and in-between the times as that can and may be).

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• Feminisms and Challenges to Institutionalized Philosophy of Religion

  Open Access•Nathan Eric Dickman, Nathan Dickman•Religions•2018

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