The Place, and Problems, of Truth

Abstract

This article takes up some questions, and problems, of truth, relating both to the place of theology, the study of religion, and the humanities in the academy, and to the lives within which scholarship happens. Looking at the university, the challenge of religious language, the limitations of the confessional, and the shattering effect of lost lives, the article places loss, desire, and ongoingness beside each other to stage the inadequacy of its own tools to a proffered vision of truth as temporally indexed adequacy: what matters to someone at some time. In conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Cavell, Sara Ahmed, and Deborah Nelson, the article performs the failures and intensities it hopes to surface.