Unfinished God

Alina N. Feld is Adjunct Associate Professor at the City University of New York and the author of Melancholy and the Otherness of God (Lexington Books, 2011), book chapters, and articles in philosophical theology. She received her MA in comparative literature from Stony Brook University and her PhD in theology from Boston University where she studied with Ray L. Hart. Her recent publications include: ‘Transparency of the Good’, in D. G. Leahy and the Thinking Now Occurring (SUNY Press, 2021), ‘Melancholia: Passing Through and Beyond’, in The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva (Open Court Publishing, 2020), ‘Thinking the Absolute Edge between Altizer and Leahy’ (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 19, no. 1, 2020), ‘Hinduism and Eastern Christianity’, in Palgrave Handbook for Radical Theology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ‘Van Gogh’s Dark Illuminations: The End of Art or the Art of the End’, in Van Gogh among the Philosophers: Painting, Thinking, Being (Lexington Books, 2017). Sean J. McGrath is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (EUP, 2021), Thinking Nature. An Essay in Negative Ecology (EUP, 2019), The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious(Routledge, 2012), Heidegger. A Very Critical Introduction (William B. Eerdmans, 2008) and The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). He is editor of The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook to Schelling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Rethinking German Idealism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010).

No one has done more to transform the contemporary study of religion than Ray L. Hart. Deeply grounded in, but not limited by, the western theological and philosophical tradition, Hart sets the highest standards for mutual understanding and scholarly communication among people holding different worldviews. As this important collection of essays by distinguished scholars makes clear, God Being Nothing represents the culmination of his remarkable spiritual and intellectual journey. By rigorously rethinking the seemingly obsolete tradition of speculative metaphysics, Hart and his commentators create a redemptive vision for today’s nihilistic culture.

• AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsForeword: Ex nihilo aliquid fitBrian SchroederPreface: On God Being NothingRay L. HartIntroduction: Saving God Being Nothing or the Labour of BecomingAlina N. FeldPart I. From Fundamental Ontology to Meontotheogony1. A Meontological Speculative Theology: God Being NothingCyril O’Regan2. The Creation of God Being NothingAndrew W. Hass3. Nihilne Plus? God Being Nothing MoreWilliam Desmond4. The Ontological Foundations of Hart’s MeontologyJason Blakeburn5. Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Hermeneutical SpiralCarla CanulloTranslated from Italian by Marco D. DozziPart II. Hart’s Thought in Context6. Ray L. Hart and the Böhmian TraditionSean J. McGrath7. Meontotheology and the Idolatry of Being: Hart and SchellingJason M. Wirth8. The Wheels of Ezekiel: From Unfinished Man to Unfinished GodDouglas Hedley9. Nihil without Nihilism: A Linguistic Model of TheogonyAgata Bielik-Robson10. Questions for Ray Lee HartRobert C. NevillePart III. Themes and Method11. Hermeneutics, Imagination and the Temporality of the Helical Spiral: Reflections on Hart’s Phenomenological TheologyElliot R. Wolfson 12. Between Two Nots: Human and Divine TurbaNathan R. Strunk13. Night Watches and the Work of Days: Learning Experiments and the American ExistentialThomas A. Carlson14. The Arousal of Freedom or Danse libre with the Nihil Alina N. Feld15. Seeing From the Centrum: Theogony as Empirical TheologyTyler Tritten16. The Trinitarian Source of Freedom in the Thinking of Ray L. Hart and David G. LeahyMichael James Dise17. Not Speaking God, Speaking NothingNicholas Genevieve-Tweed18. On Hart on AfterthinkingGarth W. GreenAfterwords to Afterthinking God Being Nothing: Toward a Speculative Metaphysics of UltimatesRay L. HartThe Poiesis of Place: Notes for a Biography of Ray L. HartAndrew D. ScrimgeourRay L. Hart ChronologyEdited by Andrew D. ScrimgeourNotes on ContributorsIndex