Marion and Milbank

Jean-Luc Marion
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Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) is among the best-known living philosophers in France and a former student of Jacques Derrida. Although much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, it is rather his explicitly religious works that have garnered much recent attention. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida. To a certain extent, Marion also takes up the mantle of Emmanuel Levinas in directing our thought beyond being. There is a widespread but possibly dubious designation of Jean-Luc Marion as a leading contributor to postmodern theology.

John Milbank
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John Milbank is a controversial Christian theologian who is Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. He previously taught at the University of Virginia and before that at the University of Cambridge. He was born and educated in Britain. A key part of the controversy surrounding Milbank concerns his view of the relationship between Theology and the social sciences. He argues that the social sciences are a product of the modern ethos of secularism, which stems from an ontology of violence. Theology, therefore, should not seek to make constructive use of social theory, for theology itself offers a comprehensive vision of all reality, extending to the social and political without the need for social theory.

Milbank is sometimes described as a metaphysical theologian, in that he is concerned with establishing a Christian trinitarian ontology. He relies heavily on aspects of Augustine and Plato's thought, in particular its modification by the neo-Platonics. Together with Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock, he has helped forge a new trajectory in constructive theology known as "radical orthodoxy" -- a predominantly Anglo-Catholic sensibility highly critical of modernity... The Centre of Theology and Philosophy, of which Milbank is the director. 10:47 AM