With Gifted Thinkers

Book excerpt: This book is a collection of engaging, entertaining, and often confronting dialogues with nine thinkers of faith in postmodernity, some of them more prominent than others, all of them possessing the rare quality or gift of thinking rigorously-tentatively-passionately: John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, Robyn Horner, Richard Kearney, Catherine Keller, Kate Rigby, Mark C. Taylor, Mark I. Wallace, and Merold Westphal. The project was driven by two ambitions: to seek out their thoughts on the question of the gift, which has become a hot topic since the early 1990s in philosophy, theology, and a whole range of academic disciplines, and which was the subject of the interviewer's doctoral work; and, more generally, to examine key elements of these thinkers' most important works. Hence, the dialogues traverse a splendid range of issues - philosophical, theological, ecological, hermeneutical, biblical, scientific, and more. What's more, the dialogical medium has the advantage of casting complex issues in extremely accessible terms, thereby making this collection a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Continental theory.