No One’s Heard of Paul Ricoeur

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 4:41 pm by Tony Jones

No One’s Heard of Paul Ricoeur 2015-03-13T16:41:22-05:00 Tony Jones

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Paul Ricoeur

I’ve spent the last week at academic conferences on religion (honestly, the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society is only vaguely academic — it is primarily fideistic, it seems). To wander around among 10,000 theologians, biblical scholars, and professors of religion at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is a great way to nerd out with your geek out. That is, if you’re into theology and religion.

But most people aren’t.

At AAR you can hear presentations with titles like,

“The Path has a Mind of its Own”: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance — an Exercise of Cross-Species Sociality
Seeing the Things You Cannot See: (Dis)-solving the Sublime in Interreligious Aesthetics through the Paintings of Hiroshi Senju
Yoga Body, Yoga Pants: The Feminization, Sexualization, and Pornification of Yoga

One of my commitments this week has been to make a short speech at the Society for Beer Lovers and Assorted Academic Research, a couple hundred young scholars who bring killer microbrews from all over the world to share at AAR. It was a pretty awesome night, with high octane brews being poured in a hot and humid church basement.

Here’s what I told them:

When I was a doctoral student, my advisor told me what her advisor had told her twenty years earlier: “At some point early in your academic career, you’ll face a fork in the road, and you’ll have to choose. You can either write for the academy, or you can write for people. You can’t do both.”

I’m here tonight to tell you: that’s bullshit. It may have been true in the past, but it is no longer. You can write for the academic guild, publish your heavily footnoted monographs and get your tenure. But you can also write passionate theology in language that people understand. You can write theology without footnotes.

Statistically speaking, the percentage of Americans who’ve heard of Paul Ricoeur is 0%. You are as much of an authority on any given subject as Ricoeur, so a block quote from Ricoeur on page three of your book doesn’t help you. In fact, it hurts you.

So, when you write for real people, disabuse yourself of everything that the academy has taught you about writing.

Also: start a blog.

I was done speaking and back to drinking beer when an esteemed New Testament scholar from an esteemed graduate school came up to me and said, “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard in a long time. If I’m as authoritative as Paul Ricoeur, something is very wrong.”

I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Welcome to the Wild West.”

Of course, I am a huge fan of Paul Ricoeur. I have books by him on my shelf, and books about him. My point was not that he’s not important. My point is that he’s obscure, at least to the vast majority of Americans.

The fact that one of the great philosophers of the 20th century is so obscure is a topic for another post. It may be tragic, but it is true. The point of this post is that theology has also become intellectualized to the point of obscurantism. NY Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer recently made this point, much to the chagrin of a fellow Patheos blogger. Mark and I went on to have the following interaction on Twitter:

Of course, this does not need to be the case. Those of us who care about good theology do not need to abdicate the public space to Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, and to books about near-death experiences and the Rapture. But I’m saying, to reclaim the public space, we’ve got to learn to talk and write like normal people.

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