I’ve got a new essay today in Obit that takes the new 2012 movie as an occasion for a reflection on why folks are always so eager to proclaim the end of the world: “You Broke It, You Bought It.”

Though the word “apocalypse” now is usually taken to mean a world-ending calamity, the original Greek word strictly translates as “revelation.” This meaning is as relevant today as when the New Testament’s last book was promulgated with the word as its title. The havoc wrought matters less than what it reveals. Because there’s only our one world, predicting its end is the ultimate jackpot in the contest for Truth. Whoever is right about how the world ends is probably right about other important things as well. Foretelling the apocalypse is an audacious attempt to assert the universality of a particular tradition and its beliefs.

I’ve found this stuff more and more worth thinking about lately as a way of exploring the imaginary dimensions of the climate crisis. What kinds of ends of the worlds have cultures imagined previously? What will the end of our world really be like?

In the last several decades, there have been numerous—and largely unprecedented—efforts around the world to develop and enact protocols for what to do in the wake of conflict and horror. From Nuremberg, to South Africa, to Guatemala, different models have been tried, and each bears lessons for the future. At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Daniel Philpott, who is working to develop a holistic framework for such work under the banner of “reconciliation.”

When we reason about justice, whether it is the justice of war or of reconciliation, we’re providing a set of moral standards. We know that they’re going to be violated. But I still think it is important to articulate them. For instance, in courts of law, if we’re trying to decide whether something is a war crime, we need some standards to know what that means. Even if moral standards aren’t always respected, people need to be able to make moral claims against violators. The ethic of reconciliation and just war theory provide a proscription for what just action ought to look like. Military academies in the United States take just war theory very seriously. This is what they teach their soldiers: no, you can’t kill civilians; no, you can’t wage aggressive war. The standards are really tough, and people are expected to conduct themselves in that way. It’s also ensconced in international law. My dream is that the ethic of reconciliation will have a similar status, providing a cookbook for how to approach certain problems, even if, at times, it is going to wind up being compromised.

“Bonjour, hello,” I’m told, finally reaching the front of the long line at the convention center cafe. It’s Montreal. I can say “bonjour,” at least. Wouldn’t that be polite? But that could invite an incomprehensible flurry of Quebecois French, which would only serve to remind me how utterly I failed to learn the language from my dear mother, who is fluent. “Hello,” I say, and order a breakfast sandwich without the ham. It comes with ham anyway.

“How’s your French?” I ask my friend, a graduate student who is here to give a paper that examines the early Christian thinker Origen through the perverse lens of Georges Bataille. “I can read it fairly well.” When he orders, he orders in English too.

Religion is back in Montreal, a city that, when it tore off the habit of de facto clerical rule during the last century, thought it had done away with the stuff. Body parts and sexual acts aren’t the bad words here (the neon awnings of strip clubs abound); say the name of a part of a Catholic church out of context in Quebecois French, and chances are you’re cussing. But over the last week, frustrating every hope for blessed laïcité, 4,500 religion scholars converged under the shadow of the royal mount for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. […]

Today at Religion Dispatches, I have an interview with novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon about her latest book, Reading Jesus.

There are calls on the right and left—both in different ways—for more religious literacy. Are you, like those, urging people to know the Bible better?

It depends on what you mean by “know.” Fundamentalists know yards of scripture. They’ve memorized it. They’ve clearly read it a lot. But how do they read? I would like people to read better rather than reading more. We have some fantasy that, at some point in history, things were fixed and therefore life was easier. The Gospels are not fixed, they’re complicated and contradictory. A lot of the evil in the world comes from not being able to endure the pain of contradiction. Rather than endure it, people act violently, because anger and aggression cut out contradiction. They say, “We’ve lost something.” But reading the Gospels carefully and openly means blasting through a fantasy of stability that never was.

Also, be sure to check out an excerpt from the book today at Killing the Buddha.

There’s a whole subculture of people who, when the newspaper arrives, go straight for the obituaries. Well, now they’ve got their own, quite excellent literary website: Obit. All death, all the time. I’ve got a new essay there on the “death of God” theology of the 1960s, a bit of a follow-up to my recent piece in the Guardian on the subject. In this one, though, I have the great joy of presenting my favorite part of the whole controversy, Anthony Towne’s Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God.

The most memorable critique, though, came in the form of the ultimate obituary. It appeared in the Methodist magazine motive as well as in the Times. Poet Anthony Towne, under the headline “God Is Dead in Georgia,” related the particulars of God’s death on Nov. 9, 1965, due to a case of “diminishing influence.” Altizer he names as the deity’s chief surgeon; dignitaries the world over and the man on the street alike comment on this unfortunate event. “It is difficult to imagine how we shall proceed without Him,” admits the pope. And, says a housewife in Elmira, New York, “At least he’s out of his misery.”

By 1968, Towne had enlarged the satire into a book, Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God. We learn straight from the divine pen about everything from creation (“what a week it has been!”) to popular preachers (“Billy Graham has halitosis of the soul”) to final reflections on life (“I’m glad I did it, but I don’t think I’ll do it again”). The Diaries are at once wise and ridiculous, casting the notion of a God who could die as no better than a joke. Towne’s “Prefatory Caveats” remind us of “God’s passionate antipathy, while he was alive, toward all forms of death.”

Read the rest of “The Life and Death of the Death of God.”

Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful.

If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind, it is likely the kind of propaganda we need. Despite a terrible title and more eye-candy than thoughtful substance, I really hate to complain about a work that captures such a shimmering diversity of perspectives and does so in an optimistic-enough fashion to inch our species one more millionth of an inch toward lasting peace and harmony.

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, at the opening of his book God without Being, “One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.”

Today, at the remarkable online journal Triple Canopy, I’ve got an essay that’s about the closest thing I’ve so far come to writing theology. It’s called “Divine Wilderness.” It is a project, actually, that I’ve been working on for some years now—originally when I was 19 years old studying computer science, then in a very confusing essay I wrote two years later, and, most recently, with a talk I gave at the Bushwick Reading Series. Thanks to the guys at Triple Canopy, the essay—as well as the accompanying images and computer code—are finally in a form that approaches comprehensibility. I hope.

They situate it in an issue called “Urbanisms: Master Plans,” putting the theological abstractions of my piece squarely in the context of architecture and urban design. It really is a wonderful thing to do to abstraction—to thrust it onto the ground, to put it among things and ask, “What have you to say to one another?” So the reflection is theological, but its consequence is intended to be of the world. I very much recommend reading it in the context of the issue as a whole, which is being slowly published a piece or two at a time.

I’ll leave you with the passage that inspired the whole project, which I discovered hidden away in David Cayley’s 1992 book Ivan Illich in Conversation. The characters are Illich and Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist French existentialist philosopher.

In a 1988 interview, the priest-turned-radical Ivan Illich recalls a 1957 encounter with Maritain. Illich wondered why there was no reference “to the concept of planning” in his work.

[Maritain] asked me if this was an English word for “accounting,” and I told him no… if it was for “engineering,” and I said no… and then at a certain moment he said to me, “Ah! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends. Now I finally understand. C’est une nouvelle espèce du péché de présomption. Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.”

Find out what he means at Triple Canopy.