Three papers and a review
This past fall, I took part in a number of academic conferences, and presented from my current research. Also, my book received its first academic review.
At Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology (20-23 October), I presented a paper titled “The Anabaptist Exception: The Divine Madness of Ecclesial (Re)Beginning,” drawing on my recent article on the Anabaptist “self-constitution” in 1525. Read the paper here.
This is not just any old heresy, what these Anabaptists are doing. In parallel to the Heideggerian distinction between the ontic and the ontological, and then in another discourse between“politics” and “the political”, we might name this a moment of the ecclesial: in which the grounding of the Church is contested.
At the American Academy of Religion a month later, I presented from unpublished research in a paper titled “Constitutive Non/Violence: Hubmaier, the Ban, and Quasi-Biopolitics.” An overlapping paper, “The Anabaptist Ban on the Threshold of (Un)Free Speech,” I shared at the (delightful) Religion and Free Speech in Early Modern Europe conference held at VU on 25-26 November:
Earlier I remarked on Harold Bender’s claim that the Anabaptists are … the antecedents of democratic freedoms. [But] if anything, the Anabaptists, at least in this case that we’ve been reading, also seem to prefigure some of the profound ambiguities of these democratic freedoms, caught up in these profound aporias of border regimes, and biopolitical disciplining where violence and nonviolence, and freedom and unfreedom become indistinguishable, as well as these ambiguities around political speech and the real philosophical difficulties of grounding political community.
Finally - my book, Theopoetics and Religious Discipline, was reviewed by Axel Marc Oaks Takács in the journal Interreligious Studies. Read the review here.
Van Hoogstraten endeavors to offer instead a theopoetics that embraces not only disruption, subversion, critique, deconstruction, suspicion, and negation, but also creativity (poïesis) and imagination toward something radically new. … This is an excellent contribution to the field and the book itself is a treasure trove of insights. …
…I am left most inspired by his turn to interreligious community, solidarity, and co-resistance as constitutive of his theopoetics of religious difference. Taking his thoughts beyond what he has written, religious communities are left subjugated by a global, neoliberal, neocolonial, and racial capitalist system. Interreligious encounter is certainly disruptive and subversive of one’s own tradition; but, more pertinently, it should help us to see how it is only in relationship, solidarity, community, and co-resistance that structures and systems of oppression can be overturned in search of a “utopian community...that may be” (237).
