Peter Rollins: Disenchantment

What are the roots of religion? One answer, put forward in accounts of the recently purported revival of Christianity among younger populations, narrates investment in faith and ritual as reactions to a profound deficiency in prevalent meaning-making mechanisms. Religion, in this understanding, springs from the experience of alienation — felt both by individuals and communities — and their longing to overcome it. Religious theory, often seen as secondary to materialist explanations, offers ways to understand this alienation. Religious practice, taken as a social technology, proposes potent ways of dissolving it: in prayer, singing, fasting, or sacrament. What if the active acknowledgement of this alienation — in contrast with ‘transcendence’ or ‘enchantment’ associated with individual religious conversion — shaped religion for our world or total alienation? What if the route to salvation not merely involved doubt or anxiety but intentionally focussed on them? The philosopher, theorist, and author Peter Rollins proposes a religionless form of Christianity which addresses alienation by moving to inhabit it more deeply. This move involves the recognition that lack — the fundamental unfulfillability of the most inalienable desires — is not simply a contingent experience in the life of individuals — brought about, in some accounts, by capitalism — but is woven into the very fabric of reality. Rollins’s work, shaped by philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, and liturgy, invites people into this experience under the umbrella of pyrotheology — a suite of practices that involves aesthetic and ritualistic elements. While contradictory to many of the traditions it stems from, pyrotheology constructs a profoundly emancipatory event. Join Rollins in a discussion on religious experience rooted in disenchantment and the possibility of spiritual fulfilment through lack.