I often begin writing for personal reasons: to slow my thinking, clarify and organize my thoughts, trace ideas, and sort concepts. Generally, a concern for something I consider wrong about the world motivates me to write. Provoked by such a concern, I write to understand why and how what is wrong came to be that way and why and how I think it can or should be different. I write in reply to H. Richard Niebuhr's moral hermeneutic question, “What's going on?” And yet, while writing typically begins (for me) as a personal search for understanding, this search eventually leads me to (re)discover my formative communities of inquiry and interpretation. None of my questions or ideas, none of my orienting values, none of my interpretive impulses are mine alone. They do not, and cannot, exist independently of others’ questions, ideas, values, and interpretations. To use Peirce's metaphor, they are slender...
A Response to My Readers
Michael S. Hogue is a Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Chicago, IL). He is a former editor of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. The author of numerous articles and monographs, including American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World (Columbia, 2018), he coauthored his most recent book with Dean Phillip Bell, Interreligious Resilience: Interreligious Leadership for a Pluralist World (Bloomsbury, 2022). His current project, “Gods and Monsters,” explores the rise of anti-pluralist, right-wing populism in the Anthropocene.
Michael S. Hogue; A Response to My Readers. American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 1 September 2023; 44 (3): 80–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/21564795.44.3.05
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