Writings

I publish and participate in the academic community between the folds of life such as family, work, and pastoral ministry. Below you can find my published works. You can find more on my academia.edu page. Beyond these pieces, current projects include co-editing with an international team of editors a volume on decolonial philosophy and Christianity, as well as turning my dissertation into a manuscript.

Perspective in Nicholas of Cusa and the Rise of the Transcendental Subject

In Art, Desire, and God: Phenomenological Perspectives (2023)

Whether for good or ill, there is something world-building in our art, in the human capacity to imagine and represent. Martin Heidegger makes this, in fact, decisive for our age: "The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture.. .. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. " Particularly important here is perspective, not merely as an artistic technique but as a whole theory of seeing and being. This chapter explores this notion using the thought of Nicholas of Cusa, or Nicholas Cusanus, a fifteenth-century German philosopher and theologian who reflects upon perspective in a way that marks the very threshold of our age. I focus on Cusa's On the Vision of God (De visione Dei), in which a picture or icon of an all-seeing face is central to what is at stake in Cusa's perspectivism, an omnivoyant that engenders an experience in which Cusa, reflecting on God's gaze, confesses "because you [God] regard me, I am. " Of particular interest is a disagreement between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque over the phenomenological nature of perspective, specifically as it pertains to whether Cusa describes an icon (Marion) or a Renaissance picture (Falque). The question is how this Cusan confession of "seeing oneself seen" speaks of both genuine subjectivity and genuine sight of the other, and whether it is about the immediacy of vision or the hermeneutical detour of vision. I show, however, that there need not be a sharp divide here, as a hidden relation between these various tensions is at play. To this end, I focus on the development of modern perspective, wrestling with the relation between Cusa's perspectivism and Renaissance linear perspective. From there, I offer an archeology of the subject that explores the phenomenological nature of aesthetic experience marking the turn to our own modern age. Modern perspective, this chapter argues, is articulated within and upon-though ultimately negates-the notion of mystical darkness, along with its themes of the mirror and enigma. In Cusan perspective we see a laying bare of the conceptuality that makes possible the birth of the modern, transcendental subject. More specifically, we see how through the rise of linear perspective, darkness comes to represent a negation of otherness at the center of modern subjectivity. This reveals malformed networks of desire in the formation of the nascent transcendental desiring subject and the modern public space it creates.

The Symbol Gives Rise to Race

In A Companion to Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil (2020)

It is my wager that Paul Ricoeur's project of a symbolics of evil can gain fresh and significant new meaning by exploring the intersection of the symbol and race. These two notions-the symbol and race-are connected at the point of their opacity: first of the symbol's opacity itself and then its racial import, which we will see. In its conceptuality, Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil is helpful toward tracing out and advancing this conversation, particularly shedding light on how race becomes a symbol of evil: by this, I mean specifically how blackness is constructed vis-à-vis the "transparency" of a whiteness which masks its own logic of defilement and of purity. I hope to show, then, that Symbolism continues to be particularly relevant in an age of racial discourse by explaining how "the symbol gives rise to thought" about race and by specifying the type of "thought" it gives through three thought-types which expose the dynamics of a racial consciousness in today's experience of evil.

Dissertation: White Enigma: Opacity, Perspective, and the Theological Formation of White Subjectivity

2022

I argue that examining the concept of “opacity” can hold together a growing tension in a contemporary phenomenology of whiteness: on the one hand, an insistence that whiteness is subjective and habitual; on the other, the insistence that whiteness is also an active, objective world horizon or ontologizing force that shapes the subject. In making this argument, I explain how the notion of opacity shapes a hermeneutical phenomenology of whiteness that can wrestle with how whiteness hides itself as benign through utilizing a symbolism of evil within theological discourse, even as it can come to function more concretely in the world as it is embodied through a network of moral discourses. I move away from a mere eidetic phenomenology of whiteness in order to examine how whiteness in this way shapes theological vision. Particularly, I make a detour around the immediacy of “white sight” in order to examine how modern sight develops as perspective arises as a symbolism of color and darkness is enmeshed in a broader symbolism of evil. The notion of “opacity” continues to hold this examination together as this development of modern vision and perspective develops from within the trajectory of the Christian mystical doctrine of the “darkness of God.” The two figures at the heart of my study, Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), bring us to the heart of this question of seeing into the darkness, and especially Cusa focuses this matter directly on modern perspective. This detour shows how darkness of color comes to be tied to a negative meaning within the making of the modern self and “new world.”

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