Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

This important contribution to the ground-breakingRadical Orthodoxyseries revisits the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Augustine and Derrida to reconsider the challenge of speaking of God through predication, silence, confession and praise. James K. A. Smith argues for God's own refusal to avoid speaking as well as for our urgent need of words to make Him visible to us. This leads to a radical new "incarnational phenomenology" in which God's love endows imperfect signs with the means to indicate true states of infinitude, and in which we may ultimately discover a new theology of the arts.

James K. A. Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.