Hope in a Secular Age cover_large.jpg

Hope in a Secular Age

Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith

This book describes a hope that acknowledges its vulnerability but presses forward nonetheless. Where critics claim that hope pacifies political action by providing false comfort, I suggest that it nourishes a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo. Drawing upon medieval theology and postmodern philosophy, I argue that an uncertain hope is necessary to sustain commitment of any kind: personal, political, or religious.

winner of The Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award + The ATF Literary Trust Book Prize

Now out in paperback! 20% off from Cambridge University Press using code HSA2022: www.cambridge.org/9781108724395.


In writing the book I tried to say something honest about issues that I myself experience as urgent - concerning the relation between atheism and Christian thought, the place of religion in secular societies, and the prospects for hope in a precarious world.

You can find an excerpt from the book here, a brief video about the book here, and a panel discussion here (with John Milbank, Marius Mjaaland, Michelle Sanchez, and Andre Willis). You can find a list of radio and podcast interviews I’ve given about the book here. Here are some nice things people have said about it:

In using a twentieth-century philosopher (Jacques Derrida) who described himself as the least of the Jews, and an ancient theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite, whose work offered the possibility of a resolutely nondogmatic Christianity, David Newheiser displays a dazzling talent for blurring the boundary between expressing faith and critiquing it. The possibility here is immense for extending, deepening, and enjoying those difficult conversations that in today’s world too easily collapse into antagonism and smoldering resentment. Hope in a Secular Age is the book that all intellectuals need to read before they visit their families for the holidays.

Martin Kavka (Professor of Religion, Florida State University)

This fine exegetical and philosophical study takes on a contemporary spiritual problem of great significance: how does the darkness of ‘unknowing’ compare in classic mystical theology (Dionysius the Areopagite) and in post-modern strategies of deferral (Derrida), and is one more attuned to the posture of theological *hope* than the other? Newheiser's textual analysis and comparison of these two difficult authors in the tradition is both sophisticated and discerning, and his final theological proposal of considerable moment for our current cultural malaises; his is an emerging talent of great insight and promise.

Sarah Coakley (Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity emerita, University of Cambridge)

In response to the deconstructive pressures of post-modernity, David Newheiser offers a defense, clearly and concisely argued, of a difficult hope at once individual and political. By calling attention to the ethical significance of Christian mysticism, Newheiser makes a significant contribution to the literature of political theology.

Denys Turner (Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor emeritus, Yale University)

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 (Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Theories & Methods of Culture, Villanova University)


Reviews

Rich, judicious, and insightful....This book offers an eloquent and moving defense of the power of hope in dark times.

Arthur Bradley, The Review of Politics

The book is excellent in substantiating the common debt that certain types of secular and religious ethics owe to religious apophaticism. Indeed, reacquainting oneself with the complex genealogy of apophatic theology, rather than its misreading which one often encounters, reveals a shared religious and secular concern for the exploration of, what from Nietzsche onwards has been called the conditions of affirmative nihilism in modernity, consisting in the nullification of those elements that hold life captive without denying life itself.

Vassilios Paipais, Contemporary Political Theory

David Newheiser draws connections between Jacques Derrida and Dionysius the Areopagite to create a picture of faith that has political and ethical urgency precisely because it is rooted in self-critical forms of hope.

The Christian Century

Newheiser is on to something that calls for increased attentiveness and further exploration, because he brings to the fore the affective texture of contemporary life and its ethico-political implications.

Graham Ward, Studies in Christian Ethics

In a moment where hope is on the wane, and most academic discussions reduce its complexity, David Newheiser has gifted us with a poignant scholarly meditation on hope that preserves its mystery and confirms its evasiveness.

Andre Willis, Critical Research on Religion

Newheiser writes for a secular audience, who may also happen to be religious, and he writes in such a way that he does not presuppose the commitments of his reader or their field of knowledge. He takes his reader into a newly created territory and argues his case with simplicity and clarity. In doing so, he writes political theology that takes the conditions of both its religiosity and its secularity seriously.

Anna Rowlands, Critical Research on Religion

Newheiser has essentially sewn an argument from his own vantage, shaped by these cross-disciplinary debates and cross-historical sources, and then stepped out of the argument so that his readers can inhabit it, perhaps better able to make sense of things.

Michelle C. Sanchez, Critical Research on Religion

Newheisers Buch ist vor allem als wirklich fruchtbarer Beitrag zur neueren Forschung über negative Theologie und Derridas seit jeher umstrittener Stellung zu ihr zu würdigen.

Hartmut von Sass, Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie

Newheiser further links hope to ethical action and justice, and critically considers how this can inform contemporary political life. This makes the book important beyond simply academic scholarship….This makes the book itself a hopeful and necessary ethical gesture in a time of significant social and political instability across the globe.

Petra Brown, Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

Newheiser creatively maps a path to exploring hope in the way he does that it opens the door to numerous areas of further inquiry. His nuanced reading of issues pertaining to religion and secularity throws light on new ways of exploring the place deconstruction and negative theology might have for engaging questions in political theology.

Myka Lahie, Modern Theology

Newheiser’s careful, clear, and calm expositions of [Derrida's] philosophy demonstrate that there is still a lot to be learnt from deconstruction. The account of hope that follows from this detailed discussion is versatile....I find his account of hope perceptive and productive for political theology.

Ulrich Schmiedel, Political Theology

This timely and insightful book makes contributions to a set of scholarly conversations that rarely intersect. It offers a fresh account of the relationship between negative theology and deconstruction, recasts the relationship between the secular and the religious in political theory, and, most fundamentally, argues for the ethical significance of hope for both individual and collective life.

Carl Hughes, Toronto Journal of Theology

Lucidly written with detail and precision, this is a book that will be relevant for both students and advanced scholars interested in the ongoing relevance of contemporary religious experience.

Jacob Benjamins, Louvain Studies

Hope in a Secular Age skillfully draws from an eclectic and rich well of sources spanning across time and philosophical commitments, envisioning a new way forward through uncertain times.

Regan Hardeman, Reading Religion

Newheiser’s...accomplished text can impel philosophers, theologians, and others to consider seemingly impossible new directions for religion in the 2020s and beyond, which would create space for love, justice, and truth where it would seem we could least expect them.

Peter Fritz, The Heythrop Journal

The manner in which Newheiser draws together Derrida and Dionysius as sharing a hope identical in kind, but not in content, provides a compelling claim to consider Derrida’s engagements with Dionysius beyond the ground staked out by previous commentators.... But Newheiser’s treatment of Derrida in terms of an ethics of hope might be the most significant contribution.

Amy Hickman, Continental Thought and Theory

Newheiser’s book reimagines a kind of faith that refuses to divide the world in two using distinctions between sacred and secular, atheism and Christianity, postmodern and premodern. Drawing from the ancient apophasis of Pseudo-Dionysius and the contemporary deconstructions of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Hope in a Secular Age bridges and departs from simplistic divisions that continue to dominate the field of Christian theology and political theology.

Maxwell Kennel, Literature and Theology

It is surely no overstatement that if in recent times we have ever needed a counter-narrative, what one might call a ‘politics of hope’, now is that time. This is what David Newheiser has given us in his prescient new book, Hope In A Secular Age.

Calvin Ulrich, Crossing

What Newheiser achieves here is really, in my estimation, the successful first proposal and invitation to think hope in the secular age as a shared horizon of experience.

Victor Emma-Adamah, Crossing

The most compelling feature of the book is Newheiser’s reading of Derrida, which draws on the full range of his corpus and consistently offers both clear exposition and compelling assessments of a notoriously difficult writer....He persuasively argues that careful attention to his treatment of religion in general (and negative theology in particular) is far more subtle and nuanced than both his champions (Martin Hägglund) and his critics (Jean-Luc Marion) contend.

Ian A. McFarland, Scottish Journal of Theology

Newheiser's work deserves commendation not just for offering an intimate reading of Derrida and a lucid appraisal of Dionysius but also for helping the reader glimpse into amazing possibilities from such analogous discourses.

Dhinakaran Savariyar, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics

The book utilizes deconstruction and negative theology as modes of thought guided by a hope that dwells in incertitude. With respect to these two interlocutors, Newheiser’s arguments are subtle and convincing, handling an enormous amount of secondary literature and alternative interpretations along the way.

Taylor Knight, Sophia