RADICAL TRADITIONS cuts new lines of inquiry across a confused array
of debates concerning the place of theology in modernity and, more
generally, the status and role of scriptural faith in contemporary life.
Charged with a rejuvenated confidence, spawned in part by the rediscovery
of reason as inescapably tradition constituted, a new generation
of theologians and religious scholars is returning to scriptural traditions
with the hope of retrieving resources long ignored, depreciated,
and in many cases ideologically suppressed by modern habits of
thought. RADICAL TRADITIONS assembles a promising matrix of strategies,
disciplines, and lines of thought that invites Jewish, Christian,
and Islamic theologians back to the word, recovering and articulating
modes of scriptural reasoning as that which always underlies modernist
reasoning and therefore has the capacity — and authority — to correct
it.
Far from despairing over modernity’s failings, postcritical theologies
rediscover resources for renewal and self-correction within the disciplines
of academic study themselves. Postcritical theologies open up
the possibility of participating once again in the living relationship that
binds together God, text, and community of interpretation. RADICAL
TRADITIONS thus advocates a ‘return to the text,’ which means a commitment
to displaying the richness and wisdom of traditions that are at
once text based, hermeneutical, and oriented to communal practice.
Books in this series offer the opportunity to speak openly with
practitioners of other faiths or even with those who profess no (or limited)
faith, both academics and nonacademics, about the ways religious
traditions address pivotal issues of the day. Unfettered by foundationalist
preoccupations, these books represent a call for new paradigms of
reason — a thinking and rationality that are more responsive than originative.
By embracing a postcritical posture, they are able to speak
unapologetically out of scriptural traditions manifest in the practices of
believing communities (Jewish, Christian, and others); articulate those
practices through disciplines of philosophic, textual, and cultural criticism;
and engage intellectual, social, and political practices that for too
long have been insulated from theological evaluation. RADICAL TRADITIONS
is radical not only in its confidence in non-apologetic theological
speech but also in how the practice of such speech challenges the current
social and political arrangements of modernity.
