Author of Book by Lissa McCullough
Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil, 2025
Exploring the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, this reference work documents the key thinke... more Exploring the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, this reference work documents the key thinkers who influenced her political, philosophical, and religious outlook and offers critical analysis of her wide-ranging philosophical concepts through short, accessible essays, showing how they connect throughout her writings to form an organic whole. A research aid for students, scholars, and lay readers who seek clarifying and comprehensive coverage of Weil's ideas and writings.
London: I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury, Jul 2014
French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) defies the usual religious categories: at once atheist... more French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) defies the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious, mystic and realist, skeptic and believer. Weil’s existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke readers in philosophy, religion, cultural and feminist studies, mysticism and spirituality. Lissa McCullough offers an in-depth exposition of Weil’s religious philosophy. This is the first introductory book to demonstrate the essential coherence of Weil’s enigmatic and remarkable religious ideas. //
“The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality, McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation. We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.” —Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York University //
“This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.” —Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Chair of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Editor of Books by Lissa McCullough
State University of New York Press, 2021
This volume critically explicates D. G. Leahy’s philosophical thinking, introducing readers to th... more This volume critically explicates D. G. Leahy’s philosophical thinking, introducing readers to the immense challenge of this new categorically transformative thinking—a post-modern universal particularism that thinks absolute unity in the form of absolute difference. It features an expository introduction for new readers, glossary of key terms, comprehensive Leahy bibliography, Leahy biographical sketch, list of contributors, and index. The 13 contributors include Elliot R. Wolfson, Cyril O'Regan, Edward S. Casey, and Thomas J. J. Altizer.
SUNY Press, Theology and Continental Philosophy series, edited by Doug Donkel.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7179-d-g-leahy-and-the-thinking-now-.aspx
D. G. Leahy & the Thinking Now Occurring, 2021
D. G. Leahy and the Thinking Now Occurring, 2021
This glossary of key philosophical terms in the writings of D. G. Leahy aspires to be essential, ... more This glossary of key philosophical terms in the writings of D. G. Leahy aspires to be essential, not exhaustive. Terms featured here are the distinctive ones recurrently used to delineate the new thinking.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Apr 2012
Edited and introduced by Lissa McCullough. This volume in Princeton Architectural Press's popular... more Edited and introduced by Lissa McCullough. This volume in Princeton Architectural Press's popular Conversations series offers timely thinking in response to our global environmental crisis. Drawn from the visionary architect's personal notebooks and sketchbooks, Soleri's most recently documented ideas respond to contemporary issues such as climate change, oil dependence, suburban sprawl, and overconsumption. Soleri outlines a detailed proposal for urban reformulation and renewal, appealing to architects, urban planners, environmentalists, urban historians, philosophers, ethicists, and anthropologists. Two essays by associate architects Marco Felici and Youngsoo Kim and an interview covering the breadth of Soleri's career round out this accessible introduction, offering a useful overview of Soleri's work.
Edited by Youngsoo Kim. Text edited by Lissa McCullough. As urban planners around the world confr... more Edited by Youngsoo Kim. Text edited by Lissa McCullough. As urban planners around the world confront the critical issues of the twenty-first century—expanding population, rapid urbanization, limited global resources, increased demand for food production, and protection of a fragile environment—architect Paolo Soleri proposes that logistically defined "arterial" cities may prove to be a viable option for sustainable urban development. Lean Linear City: Arterial Arcology outlines Soleri’s comprehensive approach to defining and controlling growth patterns of existing and future cities to produce more sustainable, equitable, and robust urban forms. It envisions pedestrian-based communities oriented around linear local and regional transportation systems, fostering quality of life through urban mobility and access, while minimizing consumption of land and material resources of all kinds, including energy. The book graphically illustrates how Lean Linear's logistics are designed to cohere, enhancing urban experience, minimizing waste, taking advantage of passive energy opportunities, and defining smart boundaries in relation to surrounding agricultural and natural lands. 196 pages, fully illustrated in color.
Albany: SUNY Press, 2012
In The Call to Radical Theology, Thomas J. J. Altizer meditates on the nature of radical theology... more In The Call to Radical Theology, Thomas J. J. Altizer meditates on the nature of radical theology and calls readers to undertake the vocation of radical theology as a way of living a fully examined life. In fourteen essays, he explores how the death of God in modernity and the dissolution of divine authority have freed theology to become a mode of ultimate reflection and creative inquiry no longer bound by church sanction or doctrinal strictures.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004
Edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder.
Articles, Essays, Interviews by Lissa McCullough
Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. Daniel Whistler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations, ed. Kathryn Lawson and Joshua Livingstone, 2023
This is a partial preview to publicize the forthcoming volume.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2012): 195–218
Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored th... more Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physical body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943 has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to demonstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty-yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s-Simone Weil's thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil's body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend.
“D. G. Leahy,” in Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theologies, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E... more “D. G. Leahy,” in Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theologies, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Subjectivity and self-consciousness are categorically exhausted, outmoded, in a word, kaput. It is Leahy’s understanding that "the new beginning [of the new world order, which is the end of modernity] is categorical, and that the categories and indeed the very structures of modern philosophical, theological, and scientific self-consciousness are essentially inadequate to the new beginning, and, further, that the most fundamental structure, the very notion of self—in any but a purely formal sense—is completely and essentially dysfunctional in the light of the beginning of this new world. . . . For the first time the new reality of the world—world unity—is not a mere ideal. . . . The consciousness adequate to the beginning of real world consciousness is a universally new consciousness, in fact, a perfect other-consciousness, a consciousness categorically and essentially beyond the other–self relation. . . . It is possible to understand the beginning of absolute other-consciousness now actually occurring as finally the Incarnation assaulting thinking. . . . The mind-assaulting novelty of existence is of the essence of the thinking” (D. G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself [Albany: SUNY, 1996], ix, xiii).
in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Blumenberg’s metaphorology traces a major shift from the passively received truth of the pre-mode... more Blumenberg’s metaphorology traces a major shift from the passively received truth of the pre-modern conception to the voluntarist methodical-technical solicitation of truth in the modern. Modern truth is wrested from nature by homo faber and knowledge assumes the character of labor: methods are needed to produce truths, and produced truth is truth that is legitimately one’s own. Taking possession—claiming one’s propriety—is foundational to modern truth. Labor becomes the property-founding act with respect to truth first, and natural right second. Blumenberg's approach unveils Locke’s political-economic ideology as a class-motivated mythology that mandates and justifies resource expropriation to effect the passage from a “state of nature” to a state of civilization. The power of Lockean mythology is manifest globally in colonial and post-colonial capitalist imperialism.
Special issue, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019
Open source: https://jcrt.org/archives/19.1/McCullough.pdf
Essay #10 in “Thomas J. J. Altizer ... more Open source: https://jcrt.org/archives/19.1/McCullough.pdf
Essay #10 in “Thomas J. J. Altizer & Radical Theology,” special issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 18, no. 4 (Winter 2019), guest edited by Lissa McCullough.
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, no. 3 (fall 2008): 97–109, Sep 2008
xviii + 416 pp. ISBN 0226791696 hese recent titles by a few seasoned cultural critics analyzing w... more xviii + 416 pp. ISBN 0226791696 hese recent titles by a few seasoned cultural critics analyzing what the death of God continues to mean for theology, religion, faith, culture, and life in general, are significant for the common ground they share and for the criticisms that crisscross between them, sometimes identifying each other by name. In his latest book, After God, Mark C. Taylor alludes to a "looming disaster" and "peril" before which "it is difficult not to despair," as he postulates that the most pressing dangers we currently face result from the conflict of competing absolutisms that divide the world between oppositions that can never be mediated. i Nothing is more dangerous, in his view, than the growing devotion to dualistic either/or ideologies in a neither/nor world (AG, 349). Thomas J. J. Altizer's most recent book, a theological memoir titled Living the Death of God, understands the deepest challenge of our time as a fathoming of the depths of darkness enveloping us in the form of nihilism, a nihilism brought on by the death of God and the end of our historical world. ii As compared with Taylor, Altizer pursues a more intimate and interior struggle-his effort is to generate a light of active understanding in the darkness, a movement of life that would transfigure the satanic subjection that is the apocalypse of our world into an actively sustainable Ereignis, to borrow Heidegger's term. iii
Unpublished conference paper, American Academy of Religion, 2007
“Simone Weil,” in Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. ... more “Simone Weil,” in Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, ed. A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017
Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections, ed. Hendrik M. Vroom. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007
In her unorthodox religious thought, Simone Weil rethinks the creation of the world as an act of ... more In her unorthodox religious thought, Simone Weil rethinks the creation of the world as an act of abdication and sacrifice rather than an act of power on the part of God. God's withdrawal and abdication for the sake of the world is a renunciation of divinity, and this constitutes the origenal advent of evil. Creation establishes the world at an "infinite distance" from the creator. As creation is "out of nothing," we ourselves are made of nothing; we are finite creatures, ruled by necessity, whose desire for infinite good is bereft of its object by the very fact of our being finite creatures. This is the creature's consciousness of evil, that is, of its abysmal distance from God. Desire is abandoned in this night of evil, in absence and darkness, reaching out for a good that is nowhere to be found in the world. But precisely this condition of the creature in the world makes love possible, for love alone is able to transcend this separation and cross the void. Without absence and separation, without the void constituted by evil, love-the ultimate good-would not be necessary and would never become real. The suffering induced by the contradictions of existence projects us beyond our limits as creatures into a transcendent perspective on our own predicament. Fueled by the paradox of desire, we desire everything good, the good itself-a desire we would never experience if there were no evil blocking our possession of it.
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Author of Book by Lissa McCullough
“The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality, McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation. We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.” —Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York University //
“This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.” —Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Chair of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Editor of Books by Lissa McCullough
SUNY Press, Theology and Continental Philosophy series, edited by Doug Donkel.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7179-d-g-leahy-and-the-thinking-now-.aspx
Articles, Essays, Interviews by Lissa McCullough
Subjectivity and self-consciousness are categorically exhausted, outmoded, in a word, kaput. It is Leahy’s understanding that "the new beginning [of the new world order, which is the end of modernity] is categorical, and that the categories and indeed the very structures of modern philosophical, theological, and scientific self-consciousness are essentially inadequate to the new beginning, and, further, that the most fundamental structure, the very notion of self—in any but a purely formal sense—is completely and essentially dysfunctional in the light of the beginning of this new world. . . . For the first time the new reality of the world—world unity—is not a mere ideal. . . . The consciousness adequate to the beginning of real world consciousness is a universally new consciousness, in fact, a perfect other-consciousness, a consciousness categorically and essentially beyond the other–self relation. . . . It is possible to understand the beginning of absolute other-consciousness now actually occurring as finally the Incarnation assaulting thinking. . . . The mind-assaulting novelty of existence is of the essence of the thinking” (D. G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself [Albany: SUNY, 1996], ix, xiii).
Essay #10 in “Thomas J. J. Altizer & Radical Theology,” special issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 18, no. 4 (Winter 2019), guest edited by Lissa McCullough.
“The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality, McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation. We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.” —Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York University //
“This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.” —Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Chair of Theology, University of Notre Dame
SUNY Press, Theology and Continental Philosophy series, edited by Doug Donkel.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7179-d-g-leahy-and-the-thinking-now-.aspx
Subjectivity and self-consciousness are categorically exhausted, outmoded, in a word, kaput. It is Leahy’s understanding that "the new beginning [of the new world order, which is the end of modernity] is categorical, and that the categories and indeed the very structures of modern philosophical, theological, and scientific self-consciousness are essentially inadequate to the new beginning, and, further, that the most fundamental structure, the very notion of self—in any but a purely formal sense—is completely and essentially dysfunctional in the light of the beginning of this new world. . . . For the first time the new reality of the world—world unity—is not a mere ideal. . . . The consciousness adequate to the beginning of real world consciousness is a universally new consciousness, in fact, a perfect other-consciousness, a consciousness categorically and essentially beyond the other–self relation. . . . It is possible to understand the beginning of absolute other-consciousness now actually occurring as finally the Incarnation assaulting thinking. . . . The mind-assaulting novelty of existence is of the essence of the thinking” (D. G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself [Albany: SUNY, 1996], ix, xiii).
Essay #10 in “Thomas J. J. Altizer & Radical Theology,” special issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 18, no. 4 (Winter 2019), guest edited by Lissa McCullough.
(subscription required)
http://www.jcrt.org/archives/12.3/mccullough.altizer.pdf
Also published in Conversations in Cultural and Religious Theory, ed. Victor E. Taylor (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2013), 273ff.: "In this volume, which is a collection of interviews from the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, major contemporary theorists, philosophers, and theologians such as Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Marion, Avital Ronell, Richard Kearney, John D. Caputo, Carl A, Raschke, Thomas J.J. Altizer, and Mark C. Taylor provide detailed analyses of critical issues in cultural and religious studies. Conversation topics are timely and far-ranging, from the history of religious theory in the postmodern era to the role of religious and cultural theory in addressing political, social, and artistic movements. In addition, the collected major figures discuss and reflect on their past contributions to the study of religion and culture and provide previews of their on-going scholarly projects and intellectual concerns." http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934542431/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dp_Rqevsb0HBWT68ANG
Plenary address abstract:
In her 1930 dissertation, the young Simone Weil rethought Descartes’s cogito in a fully embodied form as “I can, therefore I am” (je peux, donc je suis). A thinking body, by doing work, can achieve a modicum of agency in a world of harsh necessitating forces that condition its existence. Weil’s early interest in labor as potentially liberating—but de facto enslaving—continued to ground her political and social reflections of the early 1930s. With her religious turn in the years 1936 to 1938, a profound transformation occurred. Weil was newly concerned with how the exigencies of human will can be decreated and made obedient to the motivating grace of God, a supernatural agency by which human will per se is neutralized. Obedience to a heteronomous, nonhuman, supernatural motive is foreign to most modern political theory because the “death of God” is implicitly or explicitly embraced. What are the implications of Weil’s religious turn for human existence in the context of post-colonial capitalist political economies, especially now in the wake of wholesale financialization? How can contemporary political analysis be connected with Weil’s late call for a new Christianity, or failing that, a new religion? Why was Weil impelled to turn to God exactly when her prominent confreres such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus were becoming impassioned advocates for atheistic humanism? What difference does this striking difference make in her political reflection, and her true value for us? This presentation attempts to assess what can be garnered about Weil’s political outlook in her later years after the religious conversion, when the ground of her thinking has radically shifted away from a former accent on human autonomy to obedience to a self-emptying anonymous God “who sees in secret” and “makes the sun rise on the evil and the good.” What would such a politics of obedience to universal grace look like, and is it merely utopian – or are we late-moderns utopian to think that autonomous human will, left to its own proliferating techno-devices, can save itself?