For those who keep an eye on this page, or if you’re curious about my academic work and end up here, I tend to post updates on my research and writing every few months. The past school year has been busy, and over the past few months I have finished up my exams and moved on to dissertation proposal development.
In 2017 my articles in Identities, Studies in Religion, and the Mennonite Quartlerly Review each made available a different aspect of my work. The Identities article was made up of material I wrote during my masters degree, and I think that the main contribution it makes is to read Clement Rosset and Alenka Zupancic together in a way that hasn’t been done before. Beyond that, the article in Studies in Religion distills my masters thesis, comparing the postsecular thought of Daniel Collucciello Barber with the combination of Spiritualism and Rationalism in the seventeenth century Dutch Collegiants. The article in the MQR articulates the ‘philosophical turn’ I notice in recent Anabaptist Mennonite theology, and serves as a kind of preparation for some of my dissertation work. My edition of Friedmann’s last manuscript, Design for Living, is an early example of the philosophical thread in Mennonite thought, and I’ll be posting links to reviews of it as they appear.
More recently, in late 2017 the Canadian journal Dialogue published a long exploratory article I wrote called “Critique of Metaphysical Violence” – an article that begins to develop some of the work on religion, epistemology, ontology, and violence that my dissertation project will address in much more detail. I expect that the article will appear in a print issue of the journal sometime this year.
This year and the next will see a few more pieces of my writing appear, and these have more to do with my ongoing interest in philosophies of time and history, following on my masters thesis work in some ways. Recently the journal rhizomes published an article of mine on technology and time, and shortly I will submit the final version of my study of Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology to Political Theology, and next year Telos will publish my comparison of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Augustine’s Confessions. These four articles (including the Studies in Religion piece) form a kind of unit, each giving a different account of what it means to think time and history after the postsecular turn.
Lastly, this Fall I will also be teaching a second year undergraduate course called “Violence and Religion” at McMaster in the religious studies department. I’ve posted the draft syllabus here with links to some of the readings in case prospective students come across this space and are curious about the material.
Dr. Maxwell Kennel 