John Caputo on the Theopoetic Reduction

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who treats "sacred" texts as a poetics of the human condition, or as a "theo-poetics," a poetics of the event harbored in the name of God. His past books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (<em>Radical Hermeneutics</em>), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (<em>The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida</em>), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, <em>The Weakness of God</em>. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in <em>On Religion</em> and <em>What Would Jesus Deconstruct?</em> and has an interest in interacting with the working church groups like ikon and the “Emergent” Church. He is currently working in a book on our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled <em>The Fate of All Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II</em>.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, working on approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and also the presence in continental philosophy of radical religious and theological motifs. He has special interests in the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion and others); the critique of onto-theology; the question of post-modernism as "post-secularism;" the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with St. Augustine; the recent interest shown by philosophers in St. Paul; the link between Kierkegaard and deconstruction; Heidegger's early theological writings on Paul and Augustine; "secular" and "death of God" th