Dr David Newheiser - orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-7964
CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellow, March 2022 - July 2022
Home Institution: Australian Catholic University
David Newheiser is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. His research addresses ethical and political questions in conversation with continental philosophy and the history of Christian thought.
He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge UP, 2019). He is the editor of The Varieties of Atheism (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), Negative Political Theology (Modern Theology, 2020), and Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God (co-edited with Eric Bugyis, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). He is co-director (with Lexi Eikelboom) of a Templeton-funded project on secular art and spiritual understanding.
Project Title: Miracles and Modern Politics
As IASH-CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellow, David will work on his second book, tentatively titled Of Miracles: Political Theology and Amazement. Anglophone philosophers have argued extensively over whether belief in miracles is rationally justified, but this neglects the political stakes of medieval and early modern reflection on miracles. By reframing this literature, I hope to show that reflection on miracles can clarify how democratic politics works - and how it can work better. Although the political and economic systems we inhabit can seem all-encompassing, our enduring fascination with the miraculous points to a politics in which anything can happen, however unexpected.