In this interview, the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney explores the human experience of evil and the role of the human imagination in responding to this evil. Kearney focuses on the healing steps people may take in order to "work through" traumatic experience, steps that include remembering, narrative retelling, and mourning. Such working through, he says, can turn melancholia to mourning, thus allowing those who have experienced suffering and loss to "give a future to their past" and, in so doing, to "go on."

Can critical research on religion offer both an ideology critique and a critical retrieval of religious import? This essay suggests that it can, offering a programmatic sketch for a full-fledged critique of religion—a critique both aimed at religion and inspired by religion in a self-critical fashion. The sketch weds elements of a robustly normative critique of Western society with insights derived from the Frankfurt School. First the essay maps three societal macrostructures that organize much of contemporary social life—civil society, proprietary economy, and administrative state. Then it discusses solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice as societal principles that can sustain a critique of societal macrostructures. Next it identifies normative deficiencies within and between these macrostructures. On the basis of this architectonic critique, the essay then provides an account of religion in its critical and utopian roles. It concludes by envisioning a normative and emancipatory transformation of society as a whole.

A transformed idea of truth is central to the project of reformational philosophy. This paper lays groundwork for such an idea by critically retrieving Herman Dooyeweerd’s conception of truth. Section 1 explicates relevant passages in A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Section 2 demonstrates several problems in Dooyeweerd’s conception: he misconstrues religious truth, misconceives its relation to theoretical truth, and overlooks central questions of epistemology and truth theory. Section 3 proposes an alternative reformational conception of truth, in five stages. First I compare my “critical hermeneutics” with other reformational models of critique. Then I summarize my account of artistic truth and indicate its origins in reformational ontology. Next I sketch my general conception of truth and show how it responds to issues in Dooyeweerd’s conception. Then I take up the topics of objectivity and propositional truth. Finally I introduce the notion of “authentication” as a way to appropriate insights from Dooyeweerd’s emphasis on “standing in the Truth.” While abandoning his idea of transcendent truth, I seek to preserve the holism and normativity of Dooyeweerd’s radical conception.