Questioning God

Jacques Derrida and other scholars explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift.   In fifteen insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars explore the implications of deconstruction for religion, focusing on two topics: God and forgiveness. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as nonpatriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context.   Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward.   "What sets this work apart from the majority of other publications on the subject of postmodern theology and prevents it from descending into a sanctimonious hagiography of Derrida's genius is the presence among the contributors of Graham Ward and John Milbank, two of the founding members of the movement known as radical orthodoxy. This present work is the first to document supporters of radical orthodoxy critically engaging with proponents of Derridean deconstruction." —Perspectives