The Surface of the Deep by Charles E

The Surface of the Deep, Charles Winquist’s final book, is an invitation to readers to participate in Winquist’s radical transformation of theological thinking. As his final book, it also stands as the culmination of Winquist’s pioneering efforts in exploring the contours, limits, and possibilities of a genuinely postmodern theology.

“From Whitehead and Tillich, and Kant and Lonergan, all the way to Deleuze and Derrida, from a transcendental interrogation of the intelligibility of being to a deconstructive desiring theology, The Surface of the Deep is the fascinating journey of Charles Winquist, one of twentieth century American theology’s most brilliant and original minds. For Winquist, theology is always the disturbing disruptive voice that prevents one discourse from closing, that keeps thinking open to a desire for the other, to a desire beyond desire, for something we know not what that is lodged in the surface of the familiar and ordinary. An extraordinary pilgrimage, a sparking mind.”
-John D. Caputo, Villanova University

“Charles Winquist’s The Surface of the Deep offers a posthumous challenge to scholars and philosophers of religion to continue to think religion through with a range and freedom that is supported by rigorous phenomenological method at its best. By honoring theology while making minimal truth-claims for its purchase on our disciplines, Winquist clears a space for attending to the surface as well as the deep structure of articulated spiritual experience, to its graininess, its style, its ethics and aesthetics, and to the desire for significance that will not allow us to rest in dogma, however much we recognize its pressure on what we say . .. This book makes sense, and makes sense with elegance and humanity.”
-Cleo Kearns, Princeton University

“For Charles Winquist, the only thinking that mattered was thinking that both expressed and provoked desire. Having fathomed the depths of desire, he resurfaced to bring us haunting letters whose messages are profoundly unsettling. The Surface of the Deep is the final trace of a remarkable voice that fell silent all too soon.”
-Mark C. Taylor, Williams College

“The Surface of the Deep is a profound thirty-year meditation on the most pressing concerns in the study of theology and philosophy. Through these collected critical engagements with the major works of such figures as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Whitehead, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, the writings of Charles E. Winquist reveal the genesis of a distinctive ‘postmodern theology’ as a recurring surface for theoretical thinking.”
-Victor E. Taylor, York College of Pennsylvania

Contemporary Religious Thought

Clayton Crockett & Jeffrey W. Robbins, series editors

This series publishes original works dealing with cutting-edge theoretical ideas in the field of religious studies and theology. An interdisciplinary approach to religion is encouraged that develops concepts and images in transformative ways through engagement with disciplines and approaches such as Continental philosophy, semiotics, cultural studies, feminism, anthropology, psychology, political science and the media.