My Dissertation in 15 Minutes

Yes, I'm a Doctor Now

I recently defended my dissertation - “The Eclipse of the Word: The Problem of Modern Apophaticism” - during a whirlwind trip back to South Bend. Debate was quite vigorous on expected points: “Lutheran” (i.e. Neochalcedonian) Christology, the specters of Hegel and Barth, and dialectical opposition/identity vs. analogy.

You can view my opening statement in the video above. Coincidently, I’ve taken a look at Cyril O’Regan’s The Heterodox Hegel in the days after the defense, and I’m realizing my opening paragraph is more Hegelian than I knew.

Compare the following from the Encyclopedia:

The immediate consciousness of God goes no further than to tell us that he is: to tell us what he is would be an act of cognition, involving mediation. So that God as an object of religion is expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate supersensible, God in general: and the significance of religion is reduced to a minimum.

If it were really needful to win back and secure the bare belief that there is a God, or even to create it, we might well wonder at the poverty of the age which can see a gain in the merest pittance of religious consciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as to worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, dedicated to the ‘Unknown God’.