Michael Raposa has offered his readers a compelling method for philosophical theology in his Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning—one that is steeped in the Peircean logic of relations, pragmaticistically oriented toward action, and advances a “semiotic consciousness” (to use a John Deely-ism). My task in this essay is to further query Raposa in order to learn the extent to which it might be compatible with the aims of Christian theology, specifically a form of which I call “semiotic theology.” Given theosemiotic's and semiotic theology's common conceptual grounding in Peirce's philosophy, there is, ostensibly, considerable promise; however, there are certain ambiguities that remain in Theosemiotic that require explanation, especially those which are rooted in the claim that it may make ground in theological inquiry “without any practical or strategic purpose.”1 I am hoping that Raposa might then clarify his project so that a confessional, philosophical theologian...
Reading the Universe of Signs Well: Prospects for Partnering Theosemiotic with a Christian Semiotic Theology
Rory Misiewicz (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) teaches humanities at Coventry Christian Schools in Pottstown, PA. He is the author of The Analogy of Signs: Rethinking Theological Language with Charles S. Peirce (Lexington Books, 2021) and has published in the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, The International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, and the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. His work focuses on the relation between philosophical theology, semiotics, and pragmatism.
Rory Misiewicz; Reading the Universe of Signs Well: Prospects for Partnering Theosemiotic with a Christian Semiotic Theology. American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 1 September 2022; 43 (2-3): 80–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/21564795.43.2.3.05
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