Faculty/Author Talk at STH Library: Dr. Wesley Wildman

Dr. Wesley Wildman, Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics at STH, will discuss the chapter “Bliss” from his book released this month, Effing the Ineffable: Existential Mumblings at the Limits of Language. Dr. Wildman’s work confronts the human obsession with ultimate reality and our desire to conceive and speak of this reality through religious language, despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. Each chapter of the work is a meditative essay on an aspect of life that, for most people, is fraught with special spiritual significance: dreaming, suffering, creating, slipping, balancing, eclipsing, loneliness, intensity, and bliss. These moments can inspire religious questioning and commitment, and, in extreme situations, drive us in search of ways to express what matters most to us. Drawing upon American pragmatist, Anglo-American analytic, and Continental traditions of philosophical theology, Wildman shows how, through direct description, religious symbolism, and phenomenological experience, the language games of religion become a means to attempt, and, in some sense, to accomplish this task.