Human Being and Vulnerability

"The vexed issue of nature versus nurture continues to stir up controversy across the Humanities. In this carefully crafted study, Joseph Sverker stages a cross-disciplinary conversation between Judith Butler, Steven Pinker, and Colin Gunton. Although it never happened in real life, this conversation has practical and profound, real-life consequences. Sverker’s proposal for a ‘kenotic personalism’ is required reading for anyone interested in philosophical and theological anthropology."—Ulrich Schmiedel, Lecturer in Theology, Politics and Ethics, University of Edinburgh"Joseph Sverker’s Human Being and Vulnerability is an original and multi-focused analysis of the relations between the social and the biological. In bringing into conversation the disparate works of Judith Butler, Steven Pinker, and Colin Gunton, he explores the cultural, evolutionary, and theological dimensions that need to be addressed not only conceptually, but also pedagogically. We cannot properly address the complexities of the relations between biological, theological, and social life without understanding how these terms work together."—Elisabeth Grosz, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University"Joseph Sverker engages the cultural constructivism of Judith Butler and the biological essentialism of Steven Pinker in a spirited interactive reading with Colin Gunton’s relational ontology, rooted in the personal interrelations of the Trinity and mediated in the particularities of an embodied, temporal creation. The surprising result is that such a conversation, which takes ‘openness to the other’ as the defining characteristic of the spirit, is able to overcome the initial contradictions in order to explore the possibilities of mutual cross-fertilisation. In his own proposal of a kenotic personalism Sverker shows that self-giving and vulnerability are crucial and complementary aspects of our being as persons in relation, most disturbingly and movingly disclosed in the person of Christ. This book is a compelling example of how sustained self-critical theological conversation can help to overcome the divisions and fissures in our worlds of discourse and meaning which shape the lived reality which we share."—Christoph Schwöbel, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews