New Projects on the Horizon

There are a few new projects in the works that I should note for those who pass by.

1. Gerald Ens’ book Boundaries Thick and Permeable is available for purchase on Amazon. It’s the first print title offered by Zwickau Press, with more to follow. The next two titles that we aim to release later this year include Isaiah Ritzmann’s book More Than Atonement: Anabaptist Mennonite Discipleship Ecclesiology and Chris Brnjas’ book On Idolatry. Both of these books are in editing right now, and should see a print launch before the end of the calendar year.

2. Having finished up my masters thesis, with a bit more preparation to do for my defense in mid-August, I have returned to work on Being & Chiasmus which is coming along quite nicely (there’ll be sections on Katerina Kolozova, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Paul Ricoeur, Alenka Zupancic, and Clement Rossett). I just have a handful of expository sections to fill out and then I’ll send it to Punctum for review (remaining sections include Merleau-Ponty on chiasmus and Grace Jantzen on violence). Beyond that, I still have some material that I’d like to transform into the next iteration of Notes on the Compendium (with sections on Blanchot, Foucault, Groys, and Lyotard), but that will have to wait for September. After that, I want to take the year to read and write a new draft of Mennonite Metaphysics, but that’s a ways down the road.

3. A short piece I wrote for the FDTF will soon be published, in revised form, in the new issue of Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology. It’s called “Technology in the life of faith: A call for critical engagement”. And beyond that I have two conference papers out with reviewers (or close to it) – one on Mennonites and literature, and the other on phenomenology and hermeneutics.

4. My reviews of Francois Laruelle, Intellectuals and Power, Sam Steiner, In Search of Promised Lands, and A. James Reimer, Toward an Anabaptist Political Theology should each be submitted in the coming few months.

5. In the Fall I’ll present a paper called “The Secular, Secularism, and Secularization: A Conceptual Constellation” at the McMaster University Graduate Conference on Religion and Law on October 17-18. This presentation will expand upon part of the fourth chapter of my masters thesis, with a few more flourishes, and some Karl Lowith and Carl Schmitt.

6. For next year, from June 2-4 the next TMTC Mennonite grad student conference, on “Power in Perspective(s),” is being held at AMBS, and I’m hoping to submit a paper called “The Critique of Power: Epistemological Foundations in Modernity.” I’d like to have some fun with this one and use parts of Boris Groys’ On the New and Francois Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity to show how the critique of power often assumes a subject that can absent itself from all formation (by others, by institutions, by society, etc.). Still thinking about that one…

7. This year I’ll be preaching at Rainham Mennonite Church near Selkirk, and I’m excited to learn more about the 220 year history of the congregation. The June 2011 issue of Ontario Mennonite History (PDF) has a history of Rainham Mennonite in it, but I’d be curious if there are other resources out there (besides the Steiner and Burkholder books). If anyone has any thoughts feel free to send them on.

8. Feel free to email me if you have thoughts about any of the above, or if you know of future manuscripts for Zwickau Press. I’ll continue to post updates on these projects here, and I think that the genre of posts here will continue to be the same: brief updates on my writing projects, rather than reflection pieces. Thanks for reading and checking in!