Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession

Contributors

Contributors Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University. He has published extensively on French literature and philosophy . His most recent books are Interrupting Derrida and Frontières kantiennes. He is currently completing two volumes on the question of literary and philosophical reading, and working on the philosophy of democracy. Philippe Capelle is Dean of the faculty of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He is the author of Subjectivité et transcendance: Hommage à Pierre Colin; Philosophie et apologétique: Maurice Blondel cent ans après; Philosophie et théologie dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger; Jean Nabert et la question du divin; and Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry. John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. He is also David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Villanova University, where he taught from 1968 until 2004. His most recent publications include On Religion; More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are; The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion; and Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. He serves as chairman of the board of editors of Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory. Elizabeth A. Clark is the John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion at Duke University . Among her books are Women in the Early Church; Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity; and The Origenist Controversy : The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate. She is co-editor of The Journal of Early Christian Studies and of Church History, and has served as president of the American Academy of Religion. Jacques Derrida, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of California, Irvine, is one of the most important philosophers of our time. Among his more recent works are Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: Les secrets de l’archive and Voyous. His most recent work to be translated into English is Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001; The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology; Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy I; and The Work of Mourning. Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her books include Public Man, PriCaputo /Scanlon, Augustine 12/2/04 10:09 AM Page 257 vate Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought; Meditations on Modern Political Thought; Women and War; Power Trips and Other Journeys; Democracy on Trial; Augustine and the Limits of Politics; and Real Politics: Political Theory and Everyday Life. Richard Kearney is Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and visiting professor at University College Dublin. His most recent books include The Wake of Imagination; On Stories; The God Who May Be; and Strangers, Gods and Monsters. He is also the author of Poetics of Imagining; Postnationalist Ireland; and Poetics of Modernity. He is also a novelist, poet, and cultural critic. Catherine Malabou is “maître de conferences” at the Université Paris-X Nanterre. James J. O’Donnell is Provost of Georgetown University. He was formerly Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2003, he served as president of the American Philological Association. He has published a commentary on Augustine ’s Confessions, which is now available at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/conf. His book Augustine: A New Biography is forthcoming. Michael J. Scanlon, O.S.A., holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University. He is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. His area of specialization is systematic theology. He has published and taught in the areas of Christian anthropology and eschatology, the doctrine of the Trinity, religious language, and the thought of St. Augustine. Mark Vessey is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and Canada Research Chair in Literature, Christianity and Culture. He is the editor (with Hilmar Pabel) of Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament and (with Karla Pollmann) of Augustine and the Disciplines: Cassiciacum to “Confessions,” the latter based on a symposium held at Villanova University in November 2000. Hent de Vries holds the Chair of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and is director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. He is also a professor...