Meetings of the North American Paul Tillich Society
The 2010 Annual Meeting
The Annual Meeting of the North American Paul Tillich Society will take
place in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday, October 29th and Saturday, October 30th, 2010.
The American Academy of Religion group "Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion,
and Culture" meets October 30 to November 1.
If you are attending the meeting, please bring the Bulletin with you
for the Program and Banquet information. Time and room assignments are
subject to change, final time and room assignments are available in the
onsite Annual Meeting Program Book. You may also consult
this program at the AAR
website.
2010 Program
Friday, 9:00 - 11:30 am
M29-101 (Hyatt Regency - Hanover F)
Tillich and Barth (and Bonhoeffer)
- Robison James, University of Richmond emeritus
Historicizing God à la Tillich and Barth (Both!): Formula for Good Theology
- Sven Ensminger, University of Bristol
“Beyond
a disagreement on criteria” - Paul Tillich and Karl Barth on Interreligious Encounters
- Christian Danz, Univeristy of Vienna
Religion and Modern Culture. Considerations on Theology of Culture of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth
- Bruce Rittenhouse
Self-affirmation and Self-Denial in the Ethics of Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Friday, 1:00 - 3:30 pm
M29-202 (Hyatt Regency - Edgewood)
Tillich and Inter-religious Encounter
- Claude Perrottet, University of Bridgeport
Guide to the Perplexed: An Attempt to Make Sense of the Tillich-Hisamatsu Dialogues
- Ivan Hon
Paul Tillich's Thoughts and the Religiousness of Confucianism
- Tim Helton, Drew University
Finitude in Tillich: Talking Points for Jain-Christian Dialog
- Lawrence A Whitney, Boston University
Mission Theology and Interreligious Encounter: 1910-2010
Friday, 4:00 - 6:30 pm
M29-304 (Hyatt Regency - Auburn)
New Directions in Tillich and Art (and Deleuze!)
- David Nikkel, University of North Carolina, Pembroke
Updating Tillich on Religion and Art
- Russell Re Manning, University of Cambridge
“A Walk around the Rim of the Deepest Spiritual Crater in European History.” On the Aesthetics
and Theology of Horror and Hope in Anselm Kiefer and Paul Tillich
- Jari Ristiniemi, University of Gävle
Differential Thinking and New Aesthetics; Essentialization, Potentialization and Art
- John Starkey, Oklahoma City College
Tillich and Deleuze
Friday 7:00 - 10:00 pm
Annual Banquet
The annual banquet of the NAPTS will take place on Friday, October 29, at Pittypat's Porch Restaurant,
25 Andrew Young International Boulevard. 404.525.8228. The restaurant is located between Peachtree Street and
Spring Street, within easy walking distance from the convention hotels. It is also a block from the Peachtree Center Station
of MARTA, the Atlanta subway line. The distinguished speaker this year will be A. Durwood Foster. The title of his
address is “Paul Tillich: the Culminating Union Years.”
For banquet reservations:
• fparrella@scu.edu
• 408.554.4714 (Office phone at Santa Clara University)
• Text message or voice message to cell phone: 408.674.3108
Please remember to bring your checkbook or cash to the banquet if you
reserve a place by email, telephone or in person. Thank you.
Saturday, 7:00 - 8:00 am
M30-2 (Marriott Marquis - M109)
Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors
Agenda
- Acceptance of the minutes from the 2009 meeting in Montréal, Québec
- Report of the President: David Nikkel
- Report of the Secretary-Treasurer: Frederick J. Parrella
- Report of the Nominating Committee: Sharon P. Burch, Past President
- Election of new officers and board members for 2007-2008
- The Collected Works Project: Report of Mary Ann Stenger
- NAPTS.org: a Report
- Topics of future meetings
- New publications on Tillich
- Items of business from the floor
- Thank you to former officers and board members
Saturday, 9:00 - 11:30 am
M30-106 (Marriott Marquis - International 4)
Recent Developments in Tillich Scholarship
- Jeff Moore, United States Navy
Tillich at the Top of the Spea
- Daniel Morris, University of Iowa
Reconsidering Commitment: A Case for Tillich in Studies of Religious Violence
- Stephen Butler Murray, Endicott College
Exile, Symbols, and the Courage to Be: The Influence of Paul Tillich on the Womanist Theology of Delores S. Williams
- Matthew Tennant
Unity between the Ultimate and Concrete: The Success of Tillich's Trinitarian Theology
Saturday, 11:45 am - 12:45 m
M30-121 (Marriott Marquis - International A)
Annual Business Meeting of the NAPTS
Presiding: David Nikkel, President
See agenda from the Board of Directors Meeting above for this meeting.
Since the entire Society meets only once a year, please make every effort to attend.
Saturday, 4:00 - 6:30 pm
Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion and Culture Group (AAR)
A30-328 (Marriott Marquis - L503)
Tillich and New Directions in Science and Theology
This exciting session will explore the connections between Paul Tillich's thought and new directions
currently being taken in the Science-and-Theology field. The papers all recognize Tillich as a significant
resource for advancing work at the interface of science and theology. Particular papers focus on understandings
of the human person in cognitive science, new developments in emergence theory, the Gaia hypothesis and a
reinterpretation of Tillich's dialogue with Einstein. A short business meeting will follow the papers.
Presiding: Sharon Peebles Burch, Interfaith Counseling Center
- Sam Powell, Point Loma Nazarene University
Tillich's Theology and Cognitive Science: The Prospects for Theological Anthropology
Tillich's theology was written in dialog with various disciplines, especially psychology. Theology
today written in the Tillichian tradition will also take place in dialog with psychology; however,
which psychological approach is most suitable? My paper argues that theologians today should use the
results of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. These disciplines are not only empirically
and theoretically rich, they support Tillich's conviction that religion, culture and morality are
rooted in human nature. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science suggest that human behavior,
thought and emotions are the result of information from the environment being processed by discrete
cognitive functions. The functions are biological adaptations, the results of natural selection shaping
the human brain at the beginning of humankind's history as a species. Every aspect of our lives,
therefore, is intimately connected to our evolved biology, especially to our evolved cognitive functions.
These disciplines thus support Tillich's contention that the functions of spirit are realizations of the
general functions of all life.
- Ryan T. O'Leary, University of Iowa
Being and Gaia: Seeking Resources Toward a Vocabulary for Naturalistic Theology
This essay will join the conversation on three specific levels in an attempt to isolate a vocabulary within
which we can speak of God within a fully naturalistic mode. For such language we can find existential and
ontological resources in the work of Paul Tillich which must be fleshed out in a way different than what a
confessional Christianity which depends on some variety of supernaturalism can provide. For this we can turn
to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. Thus, the essay will proceed in three stages. First, it will
differentiate between senses of the terms “nature” and “naturalism,” and begin to build on that basis. Second,
it will deal with Tillich's existential analysis, especially where he rejects both pantheism and supernaturalism,
to find the degree to which his analysis can support a naturalistic theology. Third, it will show the way in
which Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis can flesh out naturalism spiritually and Tillich naturalistically, prioritizing
a robust theological understanding of nature.
- J. Patrick Woolley, University of Oxford
Tillich's Critique of Einstein and the Struggle with Natural Theology: Geometry of Nature and the
Finite-Infinite Relation
In “Tillich, Einstein, and the Quest for the Ultimate,” Gerald Holton claims that, had Einstein and Tillich ever sat
down to discuss their common philosophical heritage, they could have clarified much for one another on the relationship between
scientific and religious knowledge. He suggests advancing research along these lines would shed light on Tillich's life-long search
for Absolutes in the natural world. I argue that a constructive conversation could have taken place by focussing on Plato's two-part
methodology as interpreted by Schleiermacher: geometry and the dialectical understanding of the finite-Infinite relation. Contemplating
the relationship between mathematical and dialectical understandings of time, in particular, could have advanced communication since
it brings us, not to cosmological considerations as might be expected with Einstein, but to the epistemology of concept formation
regarding the correlation of self and world and its relationship to the Absolute. Thus, it brings a focus to time in such a way as
to consider, as Tillich puts it, “the falling together of the infinite and the finite, partly in mathematical
partly in philosophical terms.”
- Adam Pryor, Graduate Theological Union
Tillichian Teleodynamics: An Examination of the Multidimensional Unity of Emergent Life
Recent work in emergence theory has generated a significant problem for theological anthropologies that seek to explain how we are
in the image of God. After examining the work of one emergence theorist, Terrence Deacon, I will consider the constructive potential
of Tillich's notions of estrangement and the multidimensional unity of life for constructing a response to the theological
ramifications of this account of emergence theory. Such a Tillich-inspired constructive process will rely upon Robert Russell's
method of ‘Creative Mutual Interaction’ (an interdisciplinary method that builds upon Tillich's method of correlation).
Lest the interdisciplinary potential be thought to be one way, I will also begin to offer suggestions for how Tillich's theological
themes not only respond, but also might influence scientific research programs using Deacon's emergence theory by contributing to the
process of defining life.
- AAR Group Business Meeting (immediately following session)
Russell Re Manning, University of Cambridge
Sunday, 9:00 - 11:30 am
Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion and Culture Group (AAR)
A31-129 (Marriott Marquis - L405-406)
On Overcoming Dualisms with Paul Tillich: Reconsidering Empire, Secular Reason,
Religious Fundamentalism, and Everyday Religious Practices
This exciting session will showcase the intersections between Tillich's thought and contemporary
issues in theology, religion and culture. United by a concern to overcome destructive and discriminating
dualisms, the papers in this session focus on bringing Tillich's thought into a creative engagement with
issues of empire, critiques of secular reason, religious fundamentalisms, and everyday religious practices.
Presiding: Russell Re Manning, University of Cambridge
- Jacob J. Erickson, Drew University
The Ambiguity of Power: Paul Tillich, Empire, and the Kingdom of God
With experience as a military chaplain and theologian expelled by the Third Reich, “empire” was a personal and
theoretical force to be reckoned with for Paul Tillich. When he finally came to address the theme years later in volume three of
his Systematic Theology, must have been not only a problem of history in general, but a personal memory with which to wrestle—an
appropriate wrestling for a theologian working in the throes of existentialist philosophy. This paper, then, seeks to explore Paul
Tillich's concept of empire in his Systematic Theology, and examine this work in light of recent empire studies and postcolonial
theory. In this paper I want to argue that Tillich's anthropology, his “history bearing group” is too homogenous to give
a just account for multiplicity in society and in the self. His description of the self-integrating movements of life may valorize a
power that erases difference, multiplicity, and hybridity. Thus, I argue instead for an understanding of the self-integration of the
history bearing group as self-cohering multiplicity in an attempt to seriously account for difference within history-bearing groups
and within the self. Indeed, such an account might become a source of political resistance within regimes of violent homogeneity.
- Daniel Miller, Syracuse University
Theology versus Secular Reason: The Dualism of Radical Orthodoxy and the Promise of
Paul Tillich's Correlational Method
I argue that a modified Tillichian conception of correlation and symbolic language is better able to engage issues of dualism in
relation to theology and culture than the metaphysical theology of Radical Orthodoxy. I begin with a consideration of Radical
Orthodoxy's metaphysical theological proposal, particularly as it relates to analogical participation and the relation of
“theology” as opposed to “secular reason.” Focusing on the thought of John Milbank and Graham Ward, I argue
that while Radical Orthodox thinkers argue that only their metaphysical theological proposal can overcome the dualisms they take to
be constitutive of modernity and liberal theology, their theological proposal actually depends upon the maintenance of particular
dualisms (e.g., “theology” and “secular reason”). As an alternative, I suggest that Tillich's correlational
theological method and his symbolic understanding of theological language, both targets of Radical Orthodox critique, provide the
resources for rendering the boundaries between the poles of various dualisms, such as “theology” and “secular
reason,” undecidable, thereby disrupting them in a way that Radical Orthodoxy cannot.
- Mary Ann Stenger, University of Louisville
Theologies of Culture as a Base for Interreligious Efforts to Address Fundamentalisms
Tillich's theology of culture, with some points from Mark C. Taylor's and Peter Berger's “theologies” of culture, can
provide resources for interreligious encounters with fundamentalism: specifically: 1) their methods for offering a religious analysis
of culture, including a culture's seemingly “secular” elements and 2) their efforts to move beyond dualisms, especially
the underlying dualism of absolutism versus relativism. Applications to fundamentalist responses to public art, sexual issues, and
scientific understandings in several religious and cultural contexts will illustrate how these theologies of culture could be used
in interreligious discussions and actions.
- Justin Rosolino
“How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?”: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Tillich's Account
of the Subject-Object Divide and a Call to Concrete Christian Practices of Agape in the Everyday
In this paper I shall argue that Tillich's identification of the Subject-Object dichotomy as the principle location of the healing
work of the Spirit inadvertently fosters a form of Cartesian dualism. More specifically, I contend that Tillich's reliance upon the
distinctly modern metaphysical category of the ‘subject’ sponsors an idealistic picture of an unmediated,
‘spiritual’ form of interpersonal knowledge, thereby inhibiting a more robust account of sanctification by undercutting
the significance of the everyday practice of agape. While affirming Tillich's account of human estrangement, I will rely upon
Ludwig Wittgenstein as a resource for understanding Cartesianism as a practice that can, in fact, be disavowed. I will argue that the
grammar of Subject vs. Object encourages a distorted desire for a language-less, immaterial, and therefore impersonal manner of
knowing the other that unnecessarily dislocates our holistic material experience of concrete human beings. I contend that
contemporary Tillichians can, in fact, correct such metaphysical habits from within the scope of Tillich's system.
- Mike Grimshaw, University of Canterbury
Responding
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