(1:01 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Trinity Sunday

This morning in his homily, Fr. Jack was speaking in tongues. In about a month, he's retiring as pastor -- a job he only took on after a lifetime as a theologian -- and he probably got a little ahead of himself. Latin phrases were put on the table and translated. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas put in an appearance. We took a brief detour through God's answer to Job. He included his standard, and oft-repeated-by-me, explanation of the Trinity as the Father's pure self-giving, the Son's pure receptivity, and the Spirit as the explosion of love between them. It was a wonderfully theological homily to celebrate my favorite doctrine.

Last night, in Zizek's Organs without Bodies, I came across a paragraph that will fit perfectly into my future reworking of the "Zizek-as-Trinitarian" theme:

Is the Freudian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpretive appropriation) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the multitude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me matrix: the matrix of the explosive opening up of the subject onto the social space? Undergoing "symbolic castration" is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network--Oedipus, the operator of deterritorialization. However, what about the fact that, nonetheless, Oedipus "focuses" the initial "polymorphous perversity" of drives onto the mother-father-and-me coordinates? More precisely, is "symbolic castration" not also the name for a process by means of which the child-subject enters the order of sense proper, of the ABSTRACTION of sense, gaining the capacity to abstract a quality from its embeddedness in a bodily Whole, to conceive of it as a becoming no longer attributed to a certain substance--as Deleuze would have put it, "red" no longer stands for the predicate of the red thing but for the pure flow of becoming-red? So, far from tying us down to our bodily reality, "symbolic castration" sustains our very ability to "transcend" this reality and enter the space of immaterial Becoming....

As a general rule, I think that the parts of philosophical texts that have the least explicit references to God-talk are the most productive for theology.

On an unrelated note, renowned Catholic-hater Matthew Yglesias has linked to and answered Monica's survey. It almost makes me feel bad for commenting that he should "stop being a bitch" when he suggested that talking to the pope about foreign policy would be an utter waste of time. And this brings me to a point of reflection: although it's been established that The Weblog apparently passes for an "academic" or "scholarly" site in many people's minds, in what sense is it a Catholic blog? (I've seen at least one site link to me as such.) Let's do the numbers:

1. I am Roman Catholic.
   
2. Mike Hancock is Roman Catholic, although he has at times flirted with Mormonism and, worse, Lutheranism. He does, however, hold more orthodox views on women's ordination and homosexuality than I do. (To my knowledge, at least. Hopefully he can clarify if necessary when he is settled in Washington with Joe, his heterosexual life partner.)
   
3. Anthony is Episcopalian, which is a lot like being Roman Catholic, or so I've heard.
   
4. Monica reportedly attends a Quaker gathering at times, without identifying herself as a Christian, but more importantly, she is a Jungian, which is also a lot like being a Roman Catholic.
   
5. Finally, Robb is Still a Damn Nazarene, but I think he at least feels bad about it sometimes. Hopefully the rest of the Catholics on this blog can win him over -- my only worry is that his "indie cred" would be damaged by joining a highly centralized and hierarchical religious body.

And just to clarify that we're a "liberal" Catholic blog: Did you see that article in the latest NCR? Wasn't it great?

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