* Book. Rosy Cross. Question of Right and the Truth of Christianity. Ed. by Cadell Last and Daniel Garner. Philosophy Portal Books, 2026

URL = https://philosophyportal.online/rosy-cross-anthology

Abstract

"The rose in the cross of the present" is a well-known line used by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his political philosophy, Philosophy of Right. This anthology takes inspiration from this line in order to develop a "theopolitical conversation", structured in two sections, one political and one theological, and inspired by both Hegel's Philosophy of Right as well as the dialectical concept of Christian Atheism. The result is a work that aims to give body to a tradition that has its unconscious roots in the Protestant Reformation, but which becomes self-conscious of itself through the works of German Idealism in philosophy, and through the Atlantic Revolutions (American/French) in modern politics. The section focused on politics explores the "Question of Right", and thinks through liberal and Marxist theories of the state in capitalism, potential forms of social organisation either mediated by the internet or designed to sublate capitalism, the nature of crisis and contradiction, as well as engages contemporary philosophical and political debates relevant for the future of human civilisation. The second section focused on theology explores the "Truth of Christianity", and thinks through both Christianity and Atheism as a dialectical interplay, the practical embeddedness of these ideas in contemporary theological projects, the ethics of religious and non-religious forms of social identity, the structural tension between religion inside and outside of the church, the existential tension of operating at the intersection of different beliefs, the nature of belief and speculations on the trinity. The anthology features the work of 23 authors and is the result of three years of collective work inspired by courses, conferences, and a peer review process mediated by the online education platform, Philosophy Portal."

"Cadell Last and Daniel L. Garner’s (O.G. Rose) 2026 anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, brings together three primary currents of postmodern theology: Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian project, Peter Rollins’s Protestant-Pyrotheology, and the Postmodern Theology of Mark C. Taylor. These perspectives converge to explore the nature of Christianity in the wake of the death of God."

...

"The central inquiry concerns the persistence of Christianity as a revealed and divine religion. Authentic divine revelation is not merely a philosophical deduction; it is an ontological event — a face-to-face meeting with the living God. On this view, the sacraments not only symbolize divine life but also invite one into the Paschal Mystery: they effect what they signify (sacramenta efficiunt quod significant). This process culminates in the sanctifying grace identified by the Catholic Church, a substantive ontological and experiential reality validated by two thousand years of contemplative practice.

The analysis begins with a Kierkegaardian critique of the Žižekian framework, identifying two structural constraints: Christian-Atheism’s limit of religious-existential depth, and its restricted capacity for pluralist engagement with non-Christian traditions. It then turns to the work of Sean McGrath, whose “both/and” philosophical and theological system integrates depth-psychology with a rigorous form of contemplative theology which offers a counterpoint to the “either/or” logic of the volume’s other strands.

The constructive framework also draws on the broader Catholic intellectual landscape — specifically the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — and converges on the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical synthesis of Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism. The result is a post-secular and pluralist horizon within which real Catholic theological content can be held alongside the distinct traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the non-religious alike, each on their own terms."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-the-coming-age-of-the-rose-facticity)

Contents' Description

Cadell Last, from the Foreword:

"The Rosy Cross anthology is organised into two main sections, “Question of Right” and “Truth of Christianity”, each with 11 chapters, complete with two introductions (one for each section), as well as two interludes (connecting section 1 to section 2), and a conclusion. Throughout the anthology you will also find artwork by Kirsty Rosenstock inspired by processes associated with Philosophy Portal’s community “The Portal”, as well as Peter Rollins’ Wake Festival. The magnificent cover art was completed by my lifelong friend Alicia Hebert.

The work of this Foreword is to attempt not only a summary of the main threads of each work in this anthology, but to also demonstrate the logical connections between the works, which has resulted in the overall ordering of the sections and chapters.

This ordering is not only a retroactive imaginary construction, but the result of a long process at Philosophy Portal that includes courses and conferences in which the authors have had a chance to listen to each other present, as well as peer review processes, in which authors have not only read each other’s works, but have been meeting actively to provide feedback and support during the writing process itself. Those not involved in these processes are specifically targeted professors or teachers who have been actively involved in ongoing works at Philosophy Portal, whether leading courses, podcasts, or private sessions in The Portal.

Part 1: Question of Right

"The first Introduction by myself opens the section “Question of Right” and offers to situate Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in relation to the contemporary philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, as well as contemporary politics.

Žižek’s unique contribution to contemporary philosophy emphasises that Hegel has functioned as an inescapable monster in modern philosophical history (oftentimes becoming the negative point of reference for thinkers as diverse as Marx, Schopenhauer, Deleuze and Foucault). And Hegel’s unique contribution to political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right is not related to covering the field of political science with philosophy but rather thinking politics from the standpoint of philosophy’s own limitation as a strength (its capacity to patiently stay with observation of the present moment, to not jump ahead of itself into an activist orientation).

What we find in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the seed form of what he calls the “ethical system” as the “truth” (in the form of the dialectical links between family, community, and state), but also a situation of that ethical system within the Absolute Freedom of Absolute Spirit as an international order without final reconciliation or synthetic resolution. Considering that Hegel was writing at the beginning of what I call the “state-ification” of the planet, and considering that today we find significant antinomies in the role of the state and global capitalism, Hegel’s work still represents an important tarrying for any philosopher or political scientist interested in thinking how to ground human social life both nationally and internationally.

Throughout the Introduction, I suggest that we think the “parallax gap” (non-relation, limit) between antinomic positions such as “Christian or Ethno Nationalism” (on the one side, representing the importance of pre-modern law, morality and religion); and “Global Liberalism and Workers Internationalism” (on the other side, representing the importance of modern rights, ethics, and politics). This challenge is furthermore reflected or refracted through the way Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is both indebted to, but not reducible to, Plato and Christ, as well as the Protestant Reformation and Kantian transcendental philosophy.

In Chapter 1: Bonapartism is not Bonaparte, Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone helps to clarify two important Bonapartist theories of the state in global capitalism, one liberal, inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the other Marxist, inspired by Louis Bonaparte.

Cutrone emphasises that these two theories, separated by the two French Revolutions (1789-1804 and 1848), represent two competing and antagonistic interpretations of the problem of the modern state due to the emergence of capitalism as a dominant economic force in the 19th century. For the liberal interpretation, Bonapartism represents an accident and a mistake, the emergence of “strong-man rule”, in an otherwise rational and well-functioning liberal democracy; whereas, for the Marxist interpretation, Bonapartism is the inevitable result of the absence of a dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the absence of a political transformation of capitalist politics towards socialist politics. For Cutrone, while liberal politics is content with its link to capitalist politics, for Marxism, "this politics is doomed to bureaucratic management of society, as opposed to the cultivation of a truly free society.”.

Commons theorist and founder of the P2P movement, Michel Bauwens, outlines in Chapter 2 his thoughts about civilisational transition in the context of, while also departing from, the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of philosophical and political change.

Bauwens offers a “trialectical” approach which features the “commoner” as the “revolutionary subject” beyond the crisis of market and state, practically engaged in production of “cosmo-local” communities.

He draws on the fields of macro-history, relational sociology, critical realism, and integral theory to develop the concepts of:

1. stigmergy as a coordination mechanism,

2. trialectical strategies for commoners tarrying with netarchical digital platforms as alternatives to class struggle,

3. the pulsation of the commons as a macro-historical pattern pointing towards long-term sustainability between the biosphere and the technosphere, and

4. pointing towards the “archipelago of regenerative projects” as a “Network Nation” based on principles of bottom-up, community-rooted, practice-based forms cultivating a new civic imagination in a globally interconnected world

Chapter 3 features the work of political theorist Benjamin Studebaker which explores an ecology of bird metaphors, stemming from but ultimately deviating from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition.

He notes that if Hegel’s bird was the “Owl of Minerva”, representing the role of the philosopher as giving meaning to events only after the fact, and Marx’s bird was the “Gaelic rooster”, announcing the dawn to wake people from their slumber and into action before it is too late; then both of these birds are linked by the “movement of the sun” as the “modernisation of the world”. For Studebaker, this movement, ultimately one from traditional agrarian societies to modern industrial capitalism, is not our time, as we rather find ourselves stuck in a homogenous “large administrative apparatus” which undermines a genuine plurality.

He asks “What is the bird for us?” and outlines a quadruplicity of “Eagle”, “Turkey”, “Hawk” and “Vulture”:

1. The Eagle is a dishonest and exploitative bird, waging war and waiting for war

2. The Turkey is vain and silly, but courageous, trying to make things happen via protest

3. The Hawk is a big bird but always finds he is not big enough to fend off the Eagle, and

4. The Vulture watches the sick and injured land animals from a high perch, trying to get a firm grip on what is really going on

Studebaker not only identifies with the Vulture, but outlines a contextual ethics:

1. Learn the skills of impersonating a Turkey when necessary, as “Turkey-Vulture”,

2. Strategically align with an Eagle if you can convince it there is food worth pursuing,

3. But ultimately, abandon conversations with the Turkeys, and ally with the ground mammals: cats, dogs, squirrels and woodchucks

This metaphor points towards the necessity of socialist intellectuals to build a perch away from academia, and in alignment with the interests of the ground itself, real people.

Political scientist Tony Chamas opens Chapter 4 with “The Christian Case Against Capitalism” offering a “Vision for Christian Democratic Socialism”.

Chamas wants to avoid a “hollow” argument based on critiquing American forms of Christian nationalism which uncritically accept free market Reaganomics while pointing out the “socialistic components” of Christianity. Instead he centres his work on internal to Christianity itself and juxtaposes his case in relation to modern liberal secular forms of socialism, like democratic socialism, libertarian socialism or Marxism. His work attacks an ungrounded freedom which leads to the “Promethean Fantasy” of a “Limitless World”, arguing that any political telos of freedom needs to be situated in relation to arguably deeper principles like justice and the good. He also argues that the doctrine of original sin, as well as the seven deadly sins, needs to be incorporated into our political anthropology, otherwise we find ourselves in a capitalism politics which turns the moral order into a “satanic anarchy of the market”. Finally, he proposes that a Christian case for socialism would be bring us to recognise the limits of the “ideological superstructures” of left and right, the limits of materialism embodied in the idolatry of money, and towards a “limitarianism” based on the principle that “No human life shall be reduced to the existence of an animal, and no man’s power shall be elevated to that of a God.”

Banker turned commons practitioner, Joris De Kelver, engages me for a conversation in Chapter 5 orbiting the questions of leadership in a cooperative.

De Kelver is interested in the philosophical implications of a different business model, with his own work practically engaged with a cooperative focusing on the problem of housing in Belgium. He tells us that historically cooperatives emerge around basic necessities, like food, housing, transportation and education, when there is a crisis in either markets or states to provide these basic necessities. The problem for cooperatives, according to De Kelver, is related to managing and navigating intersubjective negativity, especially as it relates to the members of a cooperative overcoming their utopian idealisations of life beyond capitalism. He furthermore situates the need to work with this intersubjective negativity directly, in order to rebuild links between family, community, and state in a world dominated by banks and big technology companies.

Chapter 6 features the work of philosopher Dimitri Crooijmans “Communisation in Absolute Capitalism”.

Crooijmans work operates in an inspiration from my last book, Real Speculations, in linking “real speculations” to “communisation immanent to the social relations of capitalist society” in antagonism with “bad speculations”, as the capitalist spurious infinity of exchange value of stock market activity. This distinction between real and bad speculations is of course mobilising Hegel’s distinction of true and bad infinity from the Science of Logic, but creatively applied to contemporary political-economy with a Marxist lens. What is core for Crooijmans here is the foregrounding of a way of thinking about communism as a process, as opposed to an end point, in which we find two forms of alienation: one constitutive of life in capitalism (capital accumulation based on extraction of surplus value from human labour), and one constitutive of life as a human subject in language (subordinated to the necessity of the symbolic order). For Crooijmans, while capitalist alienation might be possible to overcome, although not by means of a progressive socialist dialectic, and not by a unified working class; communisation theory represents a radicalisation of Marx insofar as he thinks about subjective alienation as constitutive, something with which we must reconcile ourselves independent of whether or not we live in capitalism. His emphasis on communisation as a process (of breaks) leaves us with more questions than answers: the question of the problem of technofeudalism, total subsumption in capitalism, communist leadership, and universal political mobilisation. For Crooijmans, this entire process is viewed through the lens of our everyday life in the political-economy of absolute capitalism as a war, a war that may require processes of communisation in order to continue reproducing the species itself.

Hegelian philosopher Quinn Whelehan explores a movement “From the Ideology of Crisis to the Contradiction of Subjectivity” in Chapter 7.

Whelehan emphasises that today we are experiencing the contradiction of a dizzying (technological) acceleration and a sterile (political) stagnation. He attributes this sterile political stagnation to a struggle of modern subjectivity to process theopolitical negativity implicating us directly: we are fixated on the external ideological content of crisis as opposed to working with the wound constitutive of subjectivity itself.

In Part 1 of this chapter, Whelehan shifts our attention from any one specific form of crisis (meaning, economy, reproduction, etc.), and instead focuses on the logic of crisis itself as a superegoic injunction forcing us in a pseudo-activity which represses the fact of our political helplessness.

In Part 2 of this chapter, Whelehan then attempts to reflect what it would mean to take our place in the contradictions of our day by mobilising the logic of “affirmative negativity”. In this frame, he thinks of a perspective on contradiction that is itself emancipatory, which could possibly result in a disposition of faith and fidelity to the gap, or open wound of subjectivity, exposed by modernity itself.

In Chapter 8, psychotherapist Eliot Rosenstock offers a two-part work: first diffusing the spectres of post-humanism present in the work of accelerationist philosopher Nick Land; and second speculating on how the ethical system of family, community and state might be reconstituted in the context of the international.

Rosenstock critiques Land for not only his lazy and sloppy thinking about the human body as an inefficient mechanism for movement in the universe, but also for his claim that this means post-human intelligence is immanent and destined to replace the human body. He ends by claiming that, even if you cannot fully understand what Land thinks about technology, don’t let this “techno-nerd schtick” — which he thinks masks a desire to “assert dominance” — encourage you to “drop the question of your own subjectivity”. This challenge of the question of our subjectivity is pursued through the speculative triad of family, community, and state, but also embedded in the problems of our split subjectivity and the zombie nation, as thinking our nations as competitive economic blocs serving corporate goliaths dominating international relations.

Through these speculations Rosenstock proposes his notion of hypermodernity as the challenge of reconstituting “pre-modern wholes” after sublating abstract individualism. For Rosenstock, this challenge is essential to avoid deeper drift into isolationism.

Chapter 9, titled “Right and the Political Challenge of Immortality” is written by myself in the challenge to think about the philosophy of subjectivity, death and immortality in the context of a global politics for technocapital singularity.

In this challenge Land’s philosophy of exit situated in the history of “Anglophone Empire” is juxtaposed in relationship to Hegel’s philosophy of love situated in the incomplete historical quadruplicity of the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic Empires. Throughout the chapter this tension mobilises reflection on the ethics of the contemporary politics of global capitalism, the philosophy of liberal subjectivity inspired by German Idealism, and ultimately an attempt to think the difference between Nick Land’s claim that a subjective form confronting death makes no ethical difference versus the Hegelian claim that confronting death opens a key ethical difference for human history and society. This difference is furthermore situated in the link between the fall of the Germanic Empire and the rise of the Anglophone Empire, juxtaposing the problem of exit reaching limit, and the work of love as the becoming of the absolute limit.

These ideas are further developed in Chapter 10, “Love as a Tarrying with the Negative”, by psychoanalytic theorist Rebecca Rose Prentice.

Prentice's chapter mobilises a famous passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit about tarrying with the negative as a magical power in the context of the work of love. For Prentice, this magical power is about cultivating an openness and recognition of incompleteness allowing for an expanded and porous sense of self in relation to the other or otherness as such. She suggests that without this disposition we remain trapped and captivated in a closed fantasy of the other as opposed to learning to live and work in love with a real other.

Furthermore, she nominates love as the ultimate force of sublimation in the face of incredible catastrophe, and yet modestly operating at the locus of mundane and everyday small and subtle gestures. These small and subtle gestures not only bring us to face the limitations of our knowledge, but allow us to embrace the limitations of our knowledge as a loving liberation.

The final chapter of section 1 features a second article by philosopher Dimitri Crooijmans titled “Dialectical Materialism at War”.

\If Crooijmans first article situated real speculations in processes of communisation constituted by alienated subjectivity in absolute capitalism; his second article outlines the libidinal contours of contemporary political economy in the antinomy of the cultural left and cultural right wings of capitalism, via a specific popular antagonism between Piers Morgan and Nick Fuentes. For Crooijmans, the cultural left wing of capital embodies the post-Marxist position of a progressive liberal cuck, who instead of fighting to set boundaries on absolute capitalism, entertains the post-68’ axiom of “enjoyment without boundaries”. On the other hand, for Crooijmans, the cultural right wing of capital embodies a pseudo-traditionalist form of larping that is reactionary, that is caused by the hegemony of the progressive liberal cuck, whose “enjoyment without boundaries” has not only opened, but refuses to think through, the problem of large-scale institutional feminisation. His message not only serves to reveal this antinomy, but rather aims to find a self-critical form of left-wing politics that is capable of recognising the way in which the post-Marxist progressive liberal is responsible for this antinomy; while at the same time claiming that the right wing trad-larp will only result in an overbearing phallus that will do nothing but lead the feminine into a silent retreat."

Interludes

Towards section 2 we find two interludes, the first by integral theorist Erik Haines titled “A Rosy Cross of a Book”. In this Interlude, Haines focuses a review of my book Real Speculations situated in the context of his podcast journey Integral [+] Facticity. Haines traces his journey starting with his interest in the late left wing political activist Michael Brooks, through the milieu of contemporary left wing academic theory, and towards discovering my second book, Systems and Subjects. This discovery led to a conversation between the two of us exploring the potential of an intersubjective understanding moving beyond the philosophy of deconstruction.

In his review of my third book, Real Speculations, he focuses three chapters:

Introduction: Dialecticising New Atheism, which outlines the historical trajectory of New Atheism modelled using Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit from Richard Dawkins reason against religion, Sam Harris’ spirituality without religion, Jordan B. Peterson’s psychological mythology of religion, and towards the dialectical concept of Christian atheism.
Chapter 2: Phenomenology of Spirit is NOT a Theory of Everything, which critiques grand unified theories of everything as unreflective systems of thought that cannot account for the subjective dimension (in-and-for-itself of consciousness), and distinguishes Hegel’s Phenomenology as a process explicating the coming-to-be of a knower which should precede any absolute theories of being itself.
Chapter 36: The Revenge of Philosophy, which reflects the dimensions of death and immortality as requiring philosophy and not just reductive materialist science; with a special emphasis on the role of philosophy as providing conceptual rigour to understanding the implications of changes brought forth by materialist science for subjectivity, and allowing us to avoid either an accelerationist rush into techno-utopia, or a reactionary fall back into pre-modern myths.

Haines concludes his reflection pointing towards the idea that he sees Real Speculations as crucial for the ongoing development of left wing thought, especially at the intersections of theology and politics. He suggests that my engagement with Žižek should be further complimented by engagement with thinkers like Ken Wilber and Jürgen Habermas, while at the same time recognising that he has not yet had a chance to engage Žižek’s notion of Christian Atheism, which not only concludes Real Speculations, but also constitutes the second half of this anthology.

To begin section 2, we have the second Interlude, offered by Bryce Nance, who is not a Christian Atheist, but I might say, an Anarchist Atheist critical of the entire idea of Christian Atheism. For Nance, Žižek’s Christian Atheism is a “bizarre idea” in claiming that Christianity is a historical moment that makes “genuine atheism possible”. Furthermore, for Nance, the equating of an egalitarian community of believers bound by shared responsibility after the Death of God as the Holy Spirit is nothing but a fetish designed to “cleverly preserve” the “Western tradition” or the “European Symbolic Order” which holds the subject “captive”. Nance forwards the challenge that Christian Atheism should be seen as no fundamentally different from the digital fantasies of machine uploading proposed by Singulatarians in order to avoid facing “the Void alone”. In this move, he claims that God was not killed by theological paradox, Christ on the cross, but rather by modern philosophy: the Cogito (Descartes), the Critique (Kant), and the Commodity (Marx). While Žižek wants a “human-shaped scar”, a “tragic atheism”, Nance counters with a vision of Atheism centring the “Inhuman Void” on the “Cosmic scale”: the indifference of a universe that does not care about humans because it never knew we were here at all. In this cognitive critique, we find an Atheism in which we must confront Capitalism directly as the “war of Essence and Appearance”: a war in which we must curate our Appearance (qua user profile) while our Essence is stripped away (stable coherent identity). If there is a positive vision here, it is one in which we take responsibility for ourselves as humans in the universe without any theological referent; while at the same time, for Nance, this involves a recognition of our abyssal monstrosity and inevitable extinction.

PART 2: Truth of Christianity

For the opening of section 2 proper, I offer a (second) Introduction focused on Žižek’s Theopolitics.

I claim that Žižek’s Christian Atheism is not a reification of Christian history but rather represents the struggle of modern philosophy itself, from Kant’s transcendental turn through to contemporary debates, whether constituted by speculative realism or dialectical materialism. In other words, for me, Žižek’s Christian Atheism offers a window into the study of modern philosophy itself as a uniquely modernist tension between Christianity and Atheism, a tension which was almost completely absent in philosophy before the introduction of Kant’s critique, who I do think is best represented as introducing the Death of God into philosophy itself. Before Kant, we always find a permanent and eternal fixture on a figure of the big Other, whether in the form of Platonic Ideas or Spinozan Substance. However, Žižek’s work, in recognising this tension, does take it to a new level, proposing a key dialectical double-move that may be necessary to save Europe and Western civilisation from its own self-destructive death spiral, a move that includes the unity of “theological underpinning” and “atheistic undermining”. For Žižek, what is much more radical than claiming that God does not exist, is claiming that God as a perfect ideal morally regulating social life is not only necessary but evil and stupid, in need of transgression in order to reconcile ourselves with the disorienting horizon of our freedom. This leads to Žižek’s “three foundations” of Christian Atheism — the “atheist core” of Christianity, the ontology of quantum mechanics, and Kant’s transcendental parallax — which I propose can be linked in a dynamic triad between: abyssal community/network (qua “atheist core” of Christianity), open-ended/incomplete ontology (qua ontology of quantum mechanics), and speculative cognition (qua transcendental parallax). I conclude with two challenges: the first is that the real challenge today is not a return to the reality of myth against the myth of progress, but rather a reconception of how we think progress itself; and the second is linking the aforementioned triad to emancipatory politics in order to break the coordinates of both the Woke Left and Pop Right. In the concept of Christian Atheism, following Žižek, I do see the possibility, without transcendental guarantee, to link real civil society self-organisation to political processes capable of sublating capitalism for socialism.

Chapter 12 represents the formal opening of section 2, where we find radical theologian Barry Taylor in a work titled “History-Heart of Radical Theology and the Theological Unconscious”.

Taylor notes that radical theology is a unique form of theology birthed around the question of theodicy: how could an all-loving, all-powerful, all-good God allow for the evils we have endured in the 20th century, like the Holocaust or nuclear war? From these events, Taylor notes two unique forms of Christianity have taken shape: one a new brand of evangelicalism sharing the good news of salvation in Christ, and the other a form of radical theology orbiting the idea of the Death of God. For radical theology, the traditional understanding of God is perceived to be an “obscene thing”, and yet, radical theology does not want to let go of the idea that religious history and thought allows a potency and possibility for an understanding of the silence, absence, and non-existence of God. In Taylor’s work this potency and possibility represents an on-going thought experiment and dialogue with life and the world, one exploring what religion might be, despite its worst intentions. He claims that this has opened a life in relationship to a religion that is not stabilising and comforting, but rather destabilising and uncomfortable; where theology does not represent a thinking about God, but rather a thinking about the way the world we live in is theologically structured by impulses that we may not recognise as explicitly religious. He asks us to reflect on the theological unconscious, and tarry with a specific question: what in the 21st century represents the imaginative figure of the name of God? Perhaps we will find this imaginative figure in unexpected and unlikely places.

In Chapter 13, Peter Rollins introduces us to, and offers speculations on, a specific form of radical theology that he calls “pyrotheology”.

Rollins' work operates in the missed encounter between Christianity and Hegel, and specifically the idea that Hegel offers to Christianity a deeper reformation than the Protestant form that split from Catholicism. In this work he cultivates what he calls the “Church of Contradiction” as the embodiment of the radical heart of a Hegelian form of Christianity that proclaims not only the “Death of God”, in the radical theological sense, but the idea that God, the Absolute, is self-divided. The central practice of this work is called “Atheism For Lent” where the Hegelian logic of contradiction (A/B) is mobilised to radicalise our common sense notions of theism and atheism (a/theism). This work is also fundamentally connected to psychoanalysis and the idea that unconscious desire is structured around the mystery of the other’s desire (not what do I want, but what does the other want from me?).

Here Rollins’ Church of Contradiction has a specific function: to offer ritual, liturgy, and practices that cultivate relationship to the fact that, not only do I not know what I want, but also the other does not what they want. The central figure for this alienated desire is found in Christ’s crucifixion, where we find a God that is not only dying/being killed, but also a God that recognises that the Other is alienated. From this work Rollins actively helps people come to terms with existential despair in the night of fatih, where a deeper awareness of despair coincides with a newfound existential commitment to the world, and love.

Psychoanalytic theorist Helen Rollins opens Chapter 14 titled “Cave Walls and the Unconscious God”.

In this work she offers us the idea that we are in a period of the residue of God: while we do not rationally believe in God anymore, we still find our subjective structure seeking, yearning for, and finding a form of God. However, what is troubling for Rollins is that this form of God operates uncritically in the political-economy of global capitalism, where instead of seeking completion and wholeness (salvation) in God directly, we seek completion and wholeness (salvation) in the Commodity. In this claim, following Hegel and Marx, she works towards a critique of political-economy that includes a critique of the forms of subjectivity that sell off the possibility of emancipation that exists now in the unconscious yearning for transcendence in the commodity-form. She brings psychoanalysis as the critique of subjectivity as fundamentally lacking in order to encourage us to courageously confront our own nature, and from that source point, the possibility of creating better political realities.

Deconstructive theologian Jim Palmer opens Chapter 15 with a question: “Can Atheism Save Christianity?” suggests affirmatively claiming that if Christianity can be saved, it is likely to be done by atheists. In his article, he takes us through the tradition of theology that may be best conceptualised as “Christian Atheist”, from philosophers like Baruch Spinoza, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell, up through contemporary radical theologians, from Thomas Altizer, Paul van Buren, Gabriel Vahanian, and Jean-Luc Nancy, towards contemporary thinkers and doers like Slavoj Žižek and Peter Rollins. He notes that this specific tradition offers us many things that traditional Christians have avoided, including a focus on the ethics of Christ as opposed to the all-knowing figure of God, a Christianity that can interface with disciplines outside of theology, a Christianity with broader notion of church or a form beyond the church itself, and a Christianity that is more humanitarian as opposed to supernatural, as well as inclusive of outliers to specific denomination identification. At the same time, he remains critical of Christian Atheism insofar as it remains too inaccessible, insofar as it falls into its own ideological traps, and insofar as its dialectical logic represents an irresponsible use of language disconnected with the logic of the way we normally conceive of theism and atheism.

In Chapter 16, I offer an article titled “The Necessity of Christian Atheism”.

In this work, I open with an important reflection on the distinction between evolutionary theory and transcendental philosophy, with evolutionary theory focusing on the construction of an empirical history that can help us project probabilities into the future, and with transcendental philosophy focusing on the structure of our self-appearing to ourselves. For the transcendental philosophy, whose peak is represented in the thought of German Idealism, the structure of our self-appearing keeps our thought tethered to the present moment, where we are challenged to think with the negativities and mess of contemporary reality, as opposed to the construction of the past and the future. In this present, I have been sensing into the “surprising” return of interest in Christianity, which I claim has taken two dominant forms: one a revival of Orthodox or Catholic forms of Christianity internal to traditionally Protestant societies, and the other an attempt to formulate a Metamodern Christianity that harmoniously incorporates evolutionary science and a multiplicity of non-Christian religious orientations.

I claim that Christian Atheism points beyond both orientations:

(1) Christianity cannot be de-historicised from the truth of its results in the Protestant Reformation with an eternal notion of Orthodoxy or Catholicism, and

(2) Christianity is unique to history and cannot be relativised with a multiplicity of religious orientations against a shared evolutionary background.

Moreover, I claim that those motivated to re-engage Christianity are confused about its cause and consequence: oftentimes we find it is led by secular liberals who are seeking to re-enchant their experience and understanding of the world, whereas in truth, this return signals the need for subjective destitution, the meaning of the cross, which signals a repetition of the need to overcome the positive excesses of Romanisation.

Throughout the article I build the case for Christian Atheism upon the double axiom of “Christianity is the Truth of Religion” and “Atheism is the Truth of Christianity” (inspired by the structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology); and I situate this logic in the historical quadruplicity of the 20th and 21st century:

American Christianity (A) = New Age Multiculturalism (B) (20th century); Globalised Pluralism (B) = Orthodox Christian Reactionism (A) (21st century).

Towards the end I offer an explanation of both the philosophy and psychoanalysis of Christian Atheism, inspired by the Kantian and Freudian traditions respectively culminating in the works of Slavoj Žižek; and point towards the work of Peter Rollins and pyrotheology, as a practical embodiment of this work.

Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose develops the idea of “Appearing Heretical for the Fulfillment of Global Pluralism” in Chapter 17.

Garner’s work builds on the ideas developed in O.G. Rose’s Belonging Again series which forwards the necessity of a “new address” beyond both conservatism and liberalism. He claims that this new address will require faith, but a faith defined as the courage to face something either incredible or difficult (over and above an explicit belief system). Garner elaborates that faith is the courage to “crack for others” (“to be cracked and to risk cracks”), with those loved and for love. He furthermore juxtaposes this ethic against a “faith-fear” which is defined in relationship to “enclosures” where “God becomes our prison”, “walled in” against the world and others. The core of the work operates in a dialectical parallax between “Christian Atheism” (CA) and “Atheistic Christianity” (AC), where it is not only that Atheism is only possible in a movement through Christianity; but also idea that Christianity is only possible within Atheism. He centres his message to Christians and Atheists, with perhaps a special emphasis on Christians that “appearing heretical” is not “actual heresy”, serving as a necessary defence against idolatry, and also the truth of an embodiment that follows in the footsteps of Christ as a crack in the theological system of Judaism. Garner’s telos here is “social coordination” and he situates this telos in relationship to the idea of Holy Spirit as a form of "network subjectivity” that not only proclaims ontological incompleteness, but acts out the truth of this incompleteness in surprising encounters with others.

Theologian John Feldmann opens Chapter 18 with a work titled “Pyrotheological Minimalism”.

Feldmann is here offering a critical engagement with Peter Rollins’ pyrotheological movement as an heir to the radical theology of the Death of God. In this work he celebrates Rollins for not only providing the movement with a charismatic center of gravity, but also avoiding any pretension of being a “Master” of a new “meta-narrative”, and instead embodying the role of the Lacanian analyst in theological context.

However, Feldmann points towards four conundrums central to the future of pyrotheology, including:

1. The role of pyrotheology as either baptism into the Death of God, or functioning as a hospital for those already suffering the collapse of meaning?

2. The appropriate space in which pyrotheology as the enactment of crucifixion is to be practiced if not the traditional Church?

3. The position of pyrotheology as in relationship to already existing Churches or as a substitute for the traditional Church?

4. The philosophical implications of pyrotheology as offering a new metaphysics or rather restricting itself to a technology of the soul?

Feldmann develops his response to many of these questions, with the key distinction operating in an inspiration from the antinomy of “Biblical maximalism” and “Biblical minimalism” applied to the Church itself. He suggests that Maximalists believe that all churches should become pyrotheological, whereas minimalists are content to function as internal critics of the existing church. While he leaves open the possibility that pyrotheology can do both, he personally operates from a minimalist point of view, which he furthermore elaborates as a distinction with connections to the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism. For Feldmann, his work functions as a Catholic counterbalance to the Protestant tendencies of pyrotheology, which he understands as cultivating deeper fidelity and faith to the Symbolic as opposed to a (Protestant) desire for the “pure Real”.

In Chapter 19 psychoanalyst Edie Hitchcock develops an idea under the title “A Dangerous Curiosity”.

It explores the figure of “overwhelm” in both the context of being raised as a traditional Christian as well as in the context of terminally online forms of subjectivity. She seeks to trace how Christian Atheism has helped her come to terms with overwhelm in both contexts via not only its philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural theory, but also personal reflection on her own historicity. Throughout the chapter she reveals the logic of her familial upbringing, the troubling parental dynamics that shaped her as a child and as an adult, as well as the personal antinomies that influenced her, both consciously and unconsciously, towards a life committed to a “dangerous” curiosity of the world and her own self-discovery. One of the main ideas developed in this work includes an emphasis on the “thinking body”, against Plato and Kant, and informed rather by the work of philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, as well as Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this development, she has reconciled with herself as “hopelessly religious”, albeit not in the form of Christianity that structured her upbringing, but rather in an “atheistic form” in which becoming an ethical person is possible, not via a ready-made scaffolding of belief, but rather via thinking and speaking from an embodied truth.

Theologian and philosopher Cleo Kearns opens Chapter 20 with a chapter titled “Christian Atheism and the Desiring God of Monontheism”.

In this work Kearns seeks to explore the role of God the Father in the trinitarian conception of Christianity, as a compliment to the Christian Atheist focus on either the crucified Son or the Holy Spirit as community of belief. Kearns work is deeply grounded in and in conversation with the traditions of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as seeking connection with the Christian Atheism of Slavoj Žižek. However, at the same time she challenges dominant conceptions of Christian Atheism by inviting us into the challenge of not only the dead God but also the living God, that is God’s nearness and presence, his desire to be as close to us as a lover and friend. Kearns' work develops this idea through the philosophy and theology of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure and the Hegelian idea of the personhood of God as the foundation for the doctrine of God (as distinct from Roman religion). She emphasises that the challenge for thinking with the personhood of God is that it forces onto us the challenge of thinking with the theology of gender and language, a dimension that is not fundamental if we are dealing with only an impersonal God. From this line of thought she offers a powerful defence of the importance of fatherhood, that when we think the trinity — “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” — we cannot just erase the first two terms of this Borromean knot and reduce theology to a form of spiritual-secular solidarity. She also offers an exploration of feminine desire as “not just one thing”, but rather a necessary “parallax gap” between the maternal and the erotic. In closing, Kearns' work tries to affirm Christian Atheism as a revision of the doctrine of God that also lacks, while challenging us to entertain His living presence, His vital and erotic desire, as even more frightening, and thus a potentially deeper call for our courage.

Chapter 21 features the work of Dominic Sacranie under the title “Towards a Theory of Formal Belief”.

Sacranie takes issue with a formulation most forcefully developed by Slavoj Žižek for a “faith without belief”. He explores a specific question: what does it mean to dispense with something, belief, that cannot, in principle, ever be internalised. He uses money as a paradigmatic example of belief: its value emerges from its collective use, not subjective conviction.

Sacranie claims that, from the perspective of our collective participation, belief cannot be eliminated, we are rather compelled to coexist with it, or rather in the in-between space of the “with-without” it.

In thinking through belief, Sacranie comes to specific conclusions:

1. Belief is an uneasy registration of being within an outside that determines us

2. Belief allows action to bear meaning that cannot be fully known or owned by the subject who acts

3. Belief is a technology of storage, allowing incompatible orientations to co-exist without interior coherence, and

4. Belief makes responsibility liveable by distributing the weight of meaning beyond the subject alone

Experimental pyrotheologian LaVonne Chantal opens Chapter 22 with a work titled “The Phosphorescence Between Us”.

Chantal works with the Žižekian notion of Christian Atheism which places abandonment at the heart of Christianity, where faith becomes a moment of confrontation with something that is no longer guaranteed by a transcendental big Other. However, she radicalises the notion of subjective destitution, often linked to the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, with the idea of intersubjective destitution, in which not only one, but two or more people must hold that absence together without resolution or retreat. Chantal insists that intersubjective destitution is the most demanding form of faith, and something that is more than the repetition of the death drive in the release of a structure of suffering that we had been secretly (unconsciously) maintaining. The space of intersubjective destitution, for Chantal, is that of Lacan’s category of the “non-All”, a space in which our illusions of the Other dissolve and a space in which we can only persist in the courage to be negated without a reaction that corresponds to annihilating the other.

Finally, in the Conclusion, we find the work of the emerging theologian Daniel Coughlan, offering us a “Fire Sermon” about what it means to be born of spirit and become on fire.

For Coughlan, this dimension is found in loss and death, a dimension shared equally by all names, the dimension of true baptism (by loss and death itself). He tells us that, in a “Fire Sermon”, we listen for the name that would address itself to us, and that this name can come from anywhere, familiar or new. In a flash of brilliance, Coughlan reminds those that need reminding that death marks and floats toward us all in a secret name common to all names, and when death comes for us, it comes in a name. He recalls a personal tale, one that is best left untold by me, but as a representative, it points towards the power of a single death, a death which taught him about the site where one becomes weak and pathetic, a site where the ability to count at all, breaks down. He concludes our anthology with the idea that grief is the key to grace, or in the Christian Atheist terms explored throughout this anthology, perhaps, crucifixion is the key to the Holy Spirit."

Citations

Last, C. 2026. Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 45-67.

Cutrone, C. 2026. Bonapartism is not Bonaparte. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 69-86.

Bauwens, M. 2026. Breaking the Third Information Barrier. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 87-164.

Studebaker, B. 2026. On Vultures. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 165-173.

Chamas, T. 2026. The Christian Case Against Capitalism. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 175-187.

De Kelver, J. & Last, C. 2026. Leading a Cooperative. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 189-200.

Crooijmans, D. 2026. Communisation in Absolute Capitalism. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 201-274.

Whelehan, Q. 2026. From the Ideology of Crisis to the Contradiction of Subjectivity. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-326

Rosenstock, E. 2026. Landian Post-Humanism and Reconstituting the Human Whole. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 327-332.

Last, C. 2026. Right and the Political Challenge of Immortality. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 333-386.

Prentice, R. 2026. Love as a Tarrying with the Negative. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 387-393.

Crooijmans, D. 2026. Dialectical Materialism at War. In: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 395-406.

Philosophy Portal Rosy Cross Anthology

Contents

Abstract

Contents

ToC

PART 1: QUESTION OF RIGHT

PART 2: Truth of Christianity

Contents' Description

Part 1: Question of Right

Interludes

PART 2: Truth of Christianity

Citations

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