Theosemiotic
Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning
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In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “perfused” with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs.
Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by “musement” illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.
Michael Raposa’s Theosemiotic is both a consummation and a beginning. A consummation of the theosemiotic he discovered and created in his early study of Charles Peirce and then expanded to incorporate the ideas of a variety of thinkers who explore the work of signs in the cosmos. Raposa’s scholarship is impeccable. It is also the beginning of a turn to the practices and feelings of theosemiotic in a very down-to-earth way―to musement, perception, and reflection. Raposa reaches down to the root of Peirce’s semiotic and cosmology―that the meanings we enjoy in life are indeed gifts, and that we should treat them with reverence and care.---Doug Anderson, author of Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture
...an important—pragmaticism-inspired and praxis-focused—contribution to the emerging global discourse on religion in our “secular age.”
...Raposa’s overarching and more reverent approach to religious traditions and their wealth of sacred signs is far more than mere pietism. It is a recognition that signs and traditions grow and develop, and they do so most gracefully as they are interpreted playfully, rather than mechanically, with an eye toward much more than the advance of knowledge.
Raposa’s book greatly expands the work of inquiry into theology and meaning, making an explicit claim on readers of Peirce and the tradition. . . Raposa’s persuasive account brings us face to face with a fulsome challenge of engaging in joining the evolving meaning of the universe.---Roger Ward, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy
Michael Raposa has contributed a very cogent and equally engaging guide to the classically pragmatist philosophy of semiosis as it applies to the discipline of theology. . . This is an inspiring and programmatic text whose virtue lies in the logical precision of each of its articulations of an original idea as well as the author’s implicit generosity that will allow others to fill out the program.
Preface | ix
Parenthetical References | xv
Prolegomena | 1
1 A Brief History of Theosemiotic | 15
2 Signs, Selves, and Semiosis | 43
3 Love in a Universe of Chance | 75
4 Theology as Inquiry, Therapy, Praxis | 107
5 Communities of Interpretation | 155
6 Rules for Discernment | 192
7 On Prayer and the Spirit of Pragmatism | 227
Postlude: The Play of Musement | 259
Acknowledgments | 265
Notes | 269
Index | 301
