Resumen de Richard Kearney’s Anatheism and the Religious and Theoretical Provinces of Meaning

Michael Barber

• Richard Kearney’s Anatheism, a philosophical theology, critically reflects on theism or atheism, freeing each from dogmatism and violence against Levinasian Strangers. Kearney’s approach, ethically valuable, neglects the particularity of religious traditions; is so epistemologically wary that it fails to account for the positive religious experience of trusting a personal God (in Abrahamic religions); confuses the finite province of meaning (in Schutz’s sense) of theory with that of religious experience; construes mystical experience as non-knowing at the expense of love-mysticism (though Kearney elsewhere recognizes theo-erotic possibilities); and narrows religious experience to ethics. While Kearney’s theory crowds out religious experience, he also lets religious experience, understood negatively (as fostering violence) and positively (as having a God one can dance before), lead to the rejection of metaphysical theory, particularly classical metaphysics. Analytic classical metaphysicians have analyzed more carefully divine properties and the problem of evil and related their analyses to healthy religious experience in Kearney’s sense. The fundamental issue is coordinating the theoretical and religious-experiential provinces of meaning.