“Can we name, between the economy of the gift and the violent magic of sacrifice, another
image to do justice to those moments when we discover ourselves through giving to the …

The rhetoric of excess conjures up anarchy and deception, but it also shares certain features
with religious transcendence and ethical demands and obligations. How do hyperbole …

In many ways, this project is a continuation of my first book, Re-Figuring Theology, The
Rhetoric of Karl Barth (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), where I approached Barth through a …

Hyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in
current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness …

I would like to make a modest suggestion: that we look at two characteristic activities of
religious people—their habit of prai sing God and their attempts to love others—as hints or …

To convey the qualities of an elusive, luminous halo: this may be the aim of theology, as
much as it was the goal of Woolf's fiction. 2 It is, indeed, what has led me to the image of …

The discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has proven both extraordinarily powerful in its
historical effects and woefully inadequate as a historical map of theological diversity. The …

Theological change suffers under the obligation to seem—and the danger of seeming—both
consistent with what has come before and genuinely new. Where does the idea of the …

This article attempts an exploration of the limits of our capacity to weave suffering into
patterns of meaning. I try to show that something like an apophatic moment in our response …

I dissent from Hart's project of a theological aesthetics by a hair's breadth: but that hair's
breadth is tragedy. The Beauty of the Infinite is an excellent book, but it would be still better …