Fragmentation and Memory

Karmen MacKendrick is a professor of philosophy and an associate chair of the McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation at Le Moyne College. Her work in philosophical theology is entangled with several other disciplines, particularly those involved with words, with flesh, or with the pleasures to be taken in both. These preoccupations appear in several books, most recently Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions (Fordham University Press, 2013).

"While initially surprising, this book's juxtaposition of the Baltimore Catechism with psychoanalysis and deconstruction proves to be anything but artificial. The book is both philosophically probing, and a serious religious reflection. At several points it touched me personally and not just intellectually. While in many ways the author's emphasis on flesh and the finite, her intimate association of breaking with opening, of mourning with joy, of fragmentation with ecstasy, points beyond traditional orthodoxy, I would stress instead how powerful and natural her philosophical 'moves' seem when it comes to the deepest, most characteristic, and most intractable mysteries in Christian doctrine. She is especially strong on the whole sacramental sensibility, from the high mysteries of the Body and Blood in bread and wine to the only slightly post-pagan veneration of relics of the saints. For these themes, something like the tools this book deploys seem not just suitable but inevitable, even mandatory. This is the most theologically accomplished effort to demythologize 'the resurrection body' and 'eternal life' that I have read in a long while. It is exceedingly exciting to hear it from such a thoroughly and authentically contemporary voice." -- -Peter Manchester Stony Brook University, Author of The Syntax of Time "A narrator of divine surprises, MacKendrick transmutes meditations on the Baltimore Catechism into evocative accounts of memory and embodied self." -- -Mark D. Jordan Emory University