This being human is a guesthouse.

A Personal Preface, Pt 1

This being human is a guesthouse;
Every morning a new arrival.

Rumi

The hermeneutic that I have adopted for interpreting and understanding the world I live can be summed up in Richard Kearney’s word anatheism. It informs my thinking, directs my language, creates new ideas, and is slowly emerging into the daily praxis of my life. I first stumbled upon Kearney’s work on anatheism last December while doing some transcription work for a professor at my university. Though I’ve been immersed in the often overly abstract world of academic theology, I had the worst time trying to understand what was being said in the conversation that I was transcribing. Canadian philosopher and public intellectual Charles Taylor and Boston College professor of philosophy Richard Kearney were having a nice three-hour chat about Kearney’s latest work entitled Anatheism: Returning to God after God (surprise!). I struggled quite a bit with the philosophical language that the two were using. But 28 hours later, which is how long it took me to get a pretty accurate transcription, I had a fairly basic picture of Kearney’s ideas. As a side note, I had no idea transcription work would be so intensive. But I literally spent more than a fully day listening to the lecture, over, and over, and over, and over.