Being Moved by Moving Words: Crediting Rhetoric in the Theopoetics of John D. Caputo (Westar Studies)

There are many fine philosophical and theological engagements with the works of John Caputo. He is one of our most serious philosophical theologians. But he's also hilariously funny. To read Caputo is to encounter someone who wants to move you, to grasp your attention, your humor, your creativity, because what he's looking for is not another philosophical couch potato. He's looking for someone who's open to being moved to put down the book--even his book, especially his book--and risk reaching out to help another--one who is other, one at the margins of this culture. He's interested in the kind of courage that there is far too little of, and conventional religion, he suggests, has more than its share of the blame. The more familiar one becomes with his work, the more one wonders why Caputo--in all his emphasis upon hermeneutics and responsiveness to the call of the other--seemed not to see, or perhaps want to claim, the many rhetorical gifts in his possession, the many rhetorical gifts at work in his writing. Even as Caputo is a master of all things hermeneutical, he claims ignorance on all things rhetorical--viewing the word itself through an old lens of adding mere ornamentation, what he calls "rouge" to beautify the basic claim. Bringing the last forty years of work in rhetorical studies to bear on Caputo's texts, the author has written this book in hopes of convincing Caputo and his many students that he made--whether he sees it or not--what can only be called the Rhetorical Turn in philosophy and theology.

Joseph Bessler is the Robert Travis Peake Professor of Theology at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is the author of A Scandalous Jesus: How Three Historic Quests Changed Theology for the Better and the co-author, with Martin H. Belsky, of Law and Theology: Cases and Readings. His interests lie mainly in the intersection of the religious and the political.