Emergent Conference on Kearney and Caputo: Arriving
I am currently sitting on a heater in Eastern University in Philadelphia, PA.
This is the Emergent Philosophical Conversation—a meeting of minds from various sectors of avant-garde Christianity to converse about possibilities of new ways of "doing the faith"—chiefly through the works of Richard Kearney and John Caputo. Both these men and their work tends to spring from the theories of Deconstruction originally posed by Jacques Derrida.
The lot of my reading list this month has been dedicated to the books we were assigned to read before coming here. Yes, they actually gave us homework before coming to the conference. It's amazing I'm here at all, given that this is in the middle of finals and that I have enough reading/writing/painting to do for MICA.
Yet I'm also glad I'm here. I'm very glad because it means I'll get to be unplugged for awhile—at least for three days. And the conference is small—two hundred people at most, and probably quite a bit smaller than that. We'll be having dinners together, networking, and probably some of that old "Christian fellowship"—but with that fun, friendly Emergent twist. Maybe, with the combination of that twist and the witty wisdom of Caputo and Kearney, we can come to a better place of practice—of orthopraxy, and not just orthodoxy.
I'll let you guys know how it goes. I hope to be blogging the thoughts and people I encounter during this trip, and I know you all will be anxiously awaiting (inflated ego of the lonely blogger talking ;) ).
Wish me luck. I'm not two feet away from the men of honor themselves. This will be an interesting three days.