What to Believe?

Submitted by Peter on

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This bookstudy will begin August 25, 2024 only on Zoom.

If you no longer “believe in God,” the Supreme Being of classical theology, or you never did in the first place, is there anything you still ought to believe, anything you should cherish unconditionally, no matter what? In this lively and accessible book, addressed to believers, “recovering” believers, disbelievers, nonbelievers, and “nones” alike—to anyone in search of what they really do believe—the acclaimed philosopher and theologian John D. Caputo seeks out what there is to believe, with or without religion. Writing in a lucid and witty style, Caputo offers a bold account of a “radical theology” that is anything but what the word theology suggests to most people. His point of departure is autobiographical, describing growing up in the world of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, serving as an altar boy, and spending four years in a Catholic religious order after high school. Caputo places Augustine’s Confessions, Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, and Jacques Derrida and postmodern theory in conversation in the service of what he calls the “mystical sense of life.” He argues that radical theology is not simply an academic exercise but describes a concrete practice immediately relevant to the daily lives of believers and nonbelievers alike. What to Believe? is an engaging introduction to radical theology for all readers curious about what religion can mean today.

Comments

1 – What do you really love? 151

2 – How do you understand the difference between Augustine and Derrida? 155

3 – Any further comments on love? 159

4 – When we finally get to the nutshell on pg. 161, does it make sense to you? Do you understand, feel it?

5 – What do you think our author’s objective was in comparing lifetimes on earth with cosmic time? 168

6 – Do you still believe in God? or Do you believe in God yet? or Now? Is this the wrong question? 174

(Short list, as this is the week I got my pacemaker.)

1 – It seems as if our author is more interested in the future than the past. Does anything about God seem more future than past to you? How? 131

2 – To what kind of impossible is our author referring in the first full paragraph on pg. 132?

3 – What happens when the “it” of “making it happen is up to us.” is a collection of opposites? (Think of today’s political situation.) 133

4 – What do you think about the “axiological shift” from being to values? 136

5 – What is a powerless church? 137

6 – “The name of God is not the name of (a? or) being up there...but a form of life down here” Comments? 144

7 – “Tell me what you desire and I will tell you who you are and who your God is” Does this make sense to you? Comments? 145

8 – The more I read here, the more I think humanity created God rather than the reverse. Comments? 147

9 – Is theology all art (in it’s many forms)? Comments? 148

10 – Does his last paragraph reinforce my idea in question 8? 150

1 – Some think that the material world is the product of the Spirit while others think that the Spirit is the product of the material world through evolution and emergence. What do you think and why? 100

2 – Why do you think our author spent so many pages on the question of cosmic heat death? 106

3 – Given chapter seven’s description, how does this change your idea of God? 110

4 – Give a concrete example of the first paragraph. 111

5 – Does the “event” change through levels of moral development? Comments? 112

6 – Answer (or at least comment on) one of the six questions on pg. 113.

X – Remember that axiology = value or intrinsic worth.

7 – Is there an intrinsic difference between GOOD desires and BAD desires? What is it? 114

8 – I tend to work on these questions early in the day. Therefore it makes sense to ask “what will YOU do with the rest of the day”? 119

9 – “It is THE unbelievable in which we really have faith.” Comments? 120

10 – What about the event of this coming election? 121

11 – What is your reaction to: “That is the event.” 126

1 – What (do you think) is wrong with pg. 57?

2 – Christianity is the true socialism. Comments? Capitalism? 61

3 – Do you ever wonder what the next emergent property of life will be? What did (do?) you envision? 63

4 – Does the middle paragraph on pg. 66 describe the world you live in? Comments?

5 – How have you managed to combine faith and reason in your life? 71

6 – I am currently reading Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel”. Did Hitler have the Spirit? 79 Comments?

7 – “Would Jefferson have done the same thing with the ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth?” Why? Comments? 80

8 – Does fitting Jesus as a poem between natural and supernatural resonate with you? Comments? 82

9 – If you find yourself, as I do, reading sections that really resonate and make you think, and then coming across sections of “Huh???”, what are those sections? 90 (in other words, how are you doing with this book?)

10 – Biological evolution and emergence are very slow but cultural evolution is much faster. Will our next emergent property be our ability to fully understand the unconditional or the unprethinkable? 91

1 – All things have a depth dimension which is measured by their consciousness. (PDL 2024) Comments? 34

2 – What preparation do you think is required to “pay attention to what is going on”? 36

3 – If religion is the dept dimension, what more can you say about that dimension (that is helpful to someone like me) that helps us understand what is “actually going on”? 37

4 – Is our author’s use of “unconditional” making any more sense as we go along? 38

5 – How would you describe the difference between pantheism and panentheism? 40

6 – Where do you think the “binary wars” came from? 45

7 – Can we, should we, are we move(ing) beyond “personification forces us to assign a gender.” (and binary, at that)? 46

8 – Does prayer force God to be personal? Comments? 49

9 – Do you agree with our author’s answer to “What is prayer?” on pg. 53?

10 – Is the Lord’s Prayer only for theists? Comments? 54

X – Pay attention to the word “event” when it comes along.

1 – What is one significant difference between your early religious experience and Jack (or John’s)?  xiv
X – Show Carlo Rovelli book.
2 – If the Enlightenment called itself “the adulthood”, what age (in years) would you now assign to that period?  And to ours now?  7
3 – What do you think about:  radical is a modification of something that was up and running without us?  9
4 – Living Radically:  Look up “open and relation theology” and in particular:  Thomas Oord and his expulsion from the Church of the Nazarene.  Comments?  11
5 – What does doctrinaire mean to you?  14
6 – Do you prefer “God is within us” or “we are withing God”?  Why?  16
7 – What question do you have after reading the paragraph from pg. 18 → 19?
8 – What would you say about the unconditional that Caputo did not say?  22
9 – What is your favorite symbol?  Why?  23
10 – What advantage does thinking of God as love have over thinking of God as a being?  27
Y – Think carefully about pre-modern, modern and post-modern and their relation to mythology.  28
11 – What do you think about theopoetics?  32