About

Peter Casarella is a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School. He organized the seminar on 'Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Catholic Thought,' which explored the intersection of AI, theology, and philosophy, drawing upon theological works by Thomas Aquinas, Pope Francis, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as essays by Alan Turing, Sherry Turkle, and Marshall McLuhan. His work involves engaging with current events through the lens of Catholic intellectual traditions, emphasizing the importance of developing resources to regulate technological tools responsibly and to promote human flourishing. Casarella's involvement in the seminar highlights his focus on integrating theological insights with contemporary issues related to technology and ethics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Theology
• Art
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• History

Selected publications

• :<i>A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason</i>

  The Journal of Religion · 2025-09-18

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• Mystical Marginality: The Presence of Voices from the Peripheries

  Spiritus · 2025-09-01

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  Abstract: The essay interrogates the relationship between presence and absence in The Modern Mystics and highlights the role of mystical marginality through figures like Óscar Romero and Gustavo Gutiérrez. I conclude that McGinn’s volume is a practical guide for making sense of the mystical path that Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton told us would be essential for the survival of Christianity. McGinn shows the impoverishment of thinking of the Christian life as one that shuns mystical presence or that undercuts the radical witness of mystical marginality.

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• The Gift in Cusanus

  Catholic University of America Press eBooks · 2024-06-21

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• A Liturgical Decolonial Turn?

  University of Notre Dame Press eBooks · 2024-10-15

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• Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth Century French Politics by Sarah Shortall (review)

  The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review · 2024-06-28

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• <i>Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology, and Scripture</i> by JanetSoskice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), ix + 256 pp.

  Modern Theology · 2024-08-27

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  When Janet Soskice's Metaphor and Religious Language appeared in 1985, I was beginning my doctoral program and there was only one Star Wars trilogy. Metaphor was nonetheless a blockbuster in the sense that the field of philosophical theology, bifurcated between continental thinkers and analytic philosophers, had to be remapped in its wake. Soskice published The Kindness of God over two decades later. This work contributed with equal vigor to systematic theology, bringing together mature insights on gender, the Trinity, theological anthropology, and eschatology. Naming God combines the trenchant philosophical insights of her now classic work on metaphor with the systematic rigor of Kindness. The book recovers and explores the treatment of divine names in Scripture and in key thinkers such as Philo, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Louis Chrétien. Her aim is not to archive historical documents nor mount a general theory of naming. Her goal, rather, is to advance a thesis about the nexus of address and the divine names that was present in the earliest traditions of Judaism and Christianity and has largely been forgotten in the modern and contemporary world. In short, she argues naming God is not in the first instance the process of delineating attributes that can be attached or detached in divinis without recourse to the narrative pattern of Scripture itself. This narrative, starting with a key text in Exodus 3:14 (often rendered as “I am who am”), is always configured as a call that demands a meaningful and existential response. She is not thereby demoting the noetic content of the name to a mere performance. On the contrary, the unity of signifier and signified lies in the polarity of being and act in the hearkening of a prayerful respondent to God. Soskice's work is an exploration of these interstices in history and through contemporary modes of analysis. At first glance, the generalizing of the priority of “the call” might lure some critics back to the anti-elitist universalism that Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Hume enshrined as new values for determining the function of the names of God. Being addressed is a stance of openness that requires prayer; it is not a fabrication of the self-determining free will. The modern metaphysics of presence still may hold such an appeal but carries with it serious distortions of the biblical theology of naming. On the other hand, the switch from vision to audition (162-63) that is entailed in the biblical mode of address has its own anti-elitist edge, lending priority to the witness of the faithful St. Monica, for example, over that of her more lettered and eloquent son. Quite surprisingly, the early chapter on Philo sets the stage for the analytic philosophy of naming that comes later. Instead of overdetermining Philo's noteworthy role in the mediation of Stoic and Middle Platonic philosophy, Soskice looks at this neglected contemporary of St. Paul as an Alexandrian Jewish biblical theologian. In other words, Philo still can be regarded as the inventor of the tradition of unnaming God but not out of strictly philosophical motives. Philo knew from Plato's Cratylus and elsewhere that naming itself had to be problematized. He read the biblical account of creation not just to square its dogma with philosophical truths. “Philo's Moses is a seeker, the preeminent seeker of God” (51). The process of naming is a function of an experience of God as the one who creates out of nothing. Rather than offering a linchpin to the God of the philosophers or unreflective “ontotheology,” Philo transcendentalizes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in relationship to the gift of the name offered through God's revelation. Soskice also shows how Gregory of Nyssa's apophaticism epitomizes the asymmetrical dynamics of call and response. Gregory reads Exodus 3, 20, and 33 through a Christocentric lens as forms of response to the divine call. For Soskice, Nyssa's God is a speaking and teaching God (116). Gregory of Nyssa discounts cheap, Eunomian knowledge that claims to know the divine essence (136). What at first glance can seem private and solitary is actually a communal, ecclesial journey (137). Her chapter ends with a robust defense of the metaphysics of participation in Gregory's thought, but her most novel contribution lies in the underscoring of what Robert P. Scharlemann once dubbed “acoluthetic reason.” In Gregory one figures the name of the unnamable God who beckons one to be a follower. There are real epistemological consequences to this insight. The argument against Eunomius made it clear to him that there is never a point when these names add up to a circumscription of the divine essence. Consequently, “to see God's face is to be set upon the ‘unending journey accomplished by following directly behind the Word’” (135). Soskice is not extracting Gregory from the conversation about the metaphysics of presence. On the contrary, his rightful place in that tradition trades on his attentiveness to the dynamics of the call. Augustine, Soskice writes, makes a unique contribution in the history of the divine names since he “brings to the table” an “intense interest in language” (140). Augustine combines this fascination with a new recognition that God comes to those who seek and desire the Absolute not just as a “what” but as a “who” (148). The other focus of this impressive chapter is the meditation on “Being itself (in idipsum).” The treatment of this point can be read as a debate with Jean-Luc Marion about the legacy of the Bishop of Hippo with regard to the question of being. Marion's aversion to solidifying Augustine's discourse on being as chapter in the history of Christian philosophy is a post-Derridean reaction to a debate that took place in France in the 1930s, a lengthy discussion that involved Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, Étienne Gilson, and Gabriel Marcel. With this historical caveat, Soskice's rejection of Marion's aversion to metaphysics is still helpful. “Human words,” she avers, “are tokens of the word through whom all things have their being” (157). With a nod to Rowan Williams's insights in The Edge of Words, Soskice demonstrates that the Augustinian path to Christian philosophy goes through a theologically inflected phenomenology of language. Through this subtle reading of the Bishop of Hippo, Soskice effectively counters Marion's post-metaphysical impulse while still advancing the discussion of the being of God into a new realm. The present task of philosophical theology is re-examined in terms of the legacy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Soskice re-casts the entire Thomistic project as a form of spirituality, drawing generously upon Fáinche Ryan's Formation in Holiness as well as the work of David Burrell and Andrew Davison. With Burrell she claims that analogy is a semantic tool and not a post-Enlightenment epistemological strategy. What purchase, then, does Thomistic analogy so construed have on a modern philosophy of religion with its epistemological bias? Following the pattern established in her reading of Patristic texts, she argues that Thomas's metaphysics and his semantic sophistication come in second place to his reverence for the sacred naming found in and through Scripture. Karl Barth's critique of the analogia entis is thus not so much rejected as re-framed by Soskice. Barth was right to place Scripture higher than metaphysics but wrong not to ponder Thomas's reasons for returning to the problem of being in the light of the experience of creation as a gift from the Absolute that comes out of nothing. Creation ex nihilo underscores the radicality and freedom of God's unexacted love. Before such an awareness, Thomists are left with much more than seeds to plant in an analytic garden. Philosophical theology thus becomes more rational if it can concede the pre-existing spiritual act of being summoned to what is not of human making or naming. Naming God explores facets of the divine names that historical studies on this topic have failed to elucidate because of their treatment of the problem as either biblical in a very narrow sense or as a branch of the post-Cartesian patterning of the discourse of being. Soskice breaks new ground by weaving fresh readings of the Scriptures together with a doxologically shaped philosophical theology. She explores and ultimately defends creation ex nihilo with remarkable perspicacity in this same manner. If there is a shortcoming to this tour de force, it is the relative silence on the discourse of silence. Soskice is right to note that apophaticism can too quickly become severed from kataphaticism in the rationalist mode of the modern metaphysics of presence or even become an excuse for agnosticism (106). The act of God's speaking to humanity cannot be reduced to the specific locutions or to the conceptual content of those utterances without losing sight of the meaningfulness and unspeakable glory of being addressed by the divine. On the other hand, the fearsome act of attending to that presence is not circumscribed by linguistic expression. Soskice underscores with remarkable consistency the dialectical difference between human-human and divine-human exchange. She rightly abjures the facile recourse to mystery that engenders little more than obfuscation. Soskice demonstrates that entering into a mystery and pursuing rational reflection need not be seen as competing ends. Moreover, neither univocity nor equivocity is a legitimate option; the analogical “stretching” of God-talk is a different matter (104). But her openness to the darkness of embracing “incomprehensible things incomprehensibly” (Cusanus) still seems limited by her focus on the plasticity of linguistic expression. Naming God offers little in terms of lists of divine names, but this omission is no shortcoming. Soskice is engaged less by the catalogue of names than by the coming into language of a divine denomination. The very act of naming God is not intelligible apart from calling and being called. If the language of being has become flat or passé in contemporary theological discourse, then Naming God is an irenic call to arms to reconsider the being and act present in this relationship to the transcendent. The presence of one who names and is named is not erased by the radical apophaticism just mentioned. Negation in the realm of philosophical and theological anthropology is just as important as the apophasis of the name. This recognition of the negativity of the self is implicit in much of what Soskice writes about the human person as a “summoned self” but could have been made more explicit. This slim volume invokes the relationship of creation and covenant if only by frequent redress to the recapitulation of the calling of creation into being out of nothing in the Psalms, Prophets, and throughout the New Testament (71-73, 216-23). The ecumenical potential of exploring this relationship in a deeper manner through the lens of the dynamics of summoning and address is great. Naming God sets the stage for the exploration of the naming of a people who have been elected by God in relationship to the prior grounding of that covenant in the relationship of all that exists to the almighty Creator, but this path between the positions of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar is left for a future study. These reservations are little more than quibbles. Naming God is required reading for anyone with an interest in the current state of philosophical theology. Moreover, it offers a new path to conceiving of the biblical hermeneutics of divine naming in its relationship to systematic theology. In sum, this work is an invitation to ponder the phenomenon of being addressed by God as a new starting point for philosophical theology. The adherents to the theological turn in recent phenomenology (and its inverse) as well as younger practitioners of analytic theology will be challenged, surprised, and enlightened. That astonishing fact by itself merits attention, for the work is original in a sense that Soskice has always proffered originality, namely, by attending at once to the depth and complexity of the Christian tradition and to the highest standards of critical, philosophical analysis of the same.

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• Roch Kereszty: Master of Cistercian Ressourcement

  Communio International Catholic Review · 2023-12-01

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• The Pneumatology of the Synodal Church

  ˜The œThomist · 2023 · 1 citations

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  • Philosophy
  • Theology
  • Art

  The Pneumatology of the Synodal Church Peter Casarella I. The Voice From The Empty Chair THE GIFT AND AGENCY of the Holy Spirit are necessary for and central to a Church that aims to embark on a synodal path. The Holy Spirit guides the entire people of God, and the ecclesial discernment that allows the people to follow in the footsteps of Christ is also a product of the work of the Spirit. This recognition of a profoundly pneumatological presence of God on the path to synodality marks Pope Francis’s thought: “Synodality is an ecclesial journey whose soul is the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit there is no synodality.”1 Even before becoming pope, he emphasized the metaphor of the Holy Spirit at work in a symphony and suggested that the harmonizing (but not homogenizing) of difference would be the mark of the Spirit in this new ecclesial mode of discernment. More recently, synod participants and even Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, have symbolized openness to the Spirit by maintaining an empty chair at synodal gatherings.2 The Spirit lends harmony to differences that are often discordant, if not in opposition to one another. The Spirit [End Page 271] connects these diverse viewpoints because the Spirit is connection itself. The Trinitarian revelation of the Spirit is thus equally relevant: “Without the Holy Spirit who is the bond of both, one cannot understand the connecting unity between the Father and the Son.”3 The Holy Father makes the same point about the reliance of the synod itself on the unifying work of the Spirit: May this Synod be a true season of the Spirit! For we need the Spirit, the ever-new breath of God, who sets us free from every form of self-absorption, revives what is moribund, loosens shackles and spreads joy. The Holy Spirit guides us where God wants us to be, not to where our own ideas and personal tastes would lead us. Father Congar once said: “There is no need to create another Church, but to create a different Church” (True and False Reform in the Church). For a “different Church”, a Church open to the newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he, the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.4 Listening to the Spirit is what prompts members of the Church, including the bishop of Rome, to chart out a new synodal path. The report on synodality of the International Theological Commission refers to this prompting as “the parrhesia (‘boldness’) of the Spirit.”5 But the work of the Spirit in a synodal Church does not end with the initial impulse to embark on a new path. The Spirit is invoked and needed also in the process of discernment itself and in the culminating stage of the enactment of the fruits of discernment. In short, the Spirit participates in the beginning, middle, and end of the synodal process (and even, pivotally, in [End Page 272] the reiteration of the process). This essay examines the development of this thought in the pontificate of Francis. At the center of this development is an ongoing question concerning the “when” and “how” of the Spirit. Is synodality altogether new? If synodality is not new, why do we need it now? How will we know the difference between genuinely synodal and false reform, particularly given the strife for the global Church that has attended the German Synodal Way? Francis has much to say about the “when” and the “how,” even though most reporting of his call for a synodal Church has not focused on this fact. The kairós of this Spirit is likewise frequently invoked but not always grasped, especially since kairós is a qualitative and not merely a quantitative category.6 The Spirit of a synodal Church unfolds as a breath of God’s Spirit and as a guide for the Church, and the timing and mode of the unfolding must first be laid out on its own terms. In...

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• Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning by Michael L.Raposa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), xvi + 309 pp.

  Modern Theology · 2022-06-22

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• Book Review: Davies, Rachel: <i>Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation</i>

  Theological Studies · 2022-11-28

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert Bernasconi

  4 shared

• Idit Dobbs-Weinstein

  Yeshiva University

  4 shared

• Sara Brill

  4 shared

• Emanuela Bianchi

  New York University

  4 shared

• Adriel Trott

  University of Scranton

  4 shared

• Kristi Sweet

  DePaul University

  4 shared

• Dan Selzer

  University of Scranton

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• Jason Aleksander

  San Jose State University

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Awards & honors

• The American Cusanus Society (President)
• The Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. (AC…
• The Academy of Catholic Theologians (ACT) (President)
• Roman Catholic-Baptist World Alliance Ecumenical Dialogue (S…
• Roman Catholic-World Communion of Reformed Churches Dialogue