Hope in a Secular Age

David Newheiser is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His work has appeared in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religious Ethics, and Theory, Culture & Society, and he is the editor of numerous collections, including Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God (2015).

• Introduction; 1. Deconstruction: the need for negativity; 2. Negative theology: critique and commitment; 3. The discipline of hope; 4. Beyond indeterminacy and dogma; 5. Atheism and the future of faith; 6. Negative political theology; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'For David Newheiser, hope holds together relation and negation. Hope in a Secular Age explains what this means, drawing on Dionysius the Areopagite and Jacques Derrida and putting the constructive proposal that results in conversation with a range of important thinkers, from Mark Lilla to Giorgio Agamben. Offering important correctives to scholarship on Continental philosophy of religion, this book reframes the field by focusing on ethics rather than epistemology. Particularly exciting are little-known, unpublished, but quite revealing texts by Derrida that Newheiser unearthed and mobilizes to alter how we understand the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology.' Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University, Pennsylvania