The Land of Unlikeness

So I just presented this at the Popular Culture/American Culture conference up in Niagara Falls. Dan is making me post it here, so if you don’t like you can gnaw his ear. Actually, I’m trying to work it into an article so I’d love to hear comments:

GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that. Continue reading ‘Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek.’