Disconnected
The Devil Reads Derrida, and Other Essays On the University, the Church,
Politics, and the Arts
by James K. A. Smith
Eerdmans, 2009
(163 pages, $18.00, paperback)
reviewed by Micah Mattix
I was unsure, at first, whether I wanted to read, much less review, James K. A. Smith’s collection of essays, The Devil Reads Derrida. It is not that I have something against Derrida. Smith rightly argues elsewhere that figures such as Derrida and Foucault are neither devils nor saints, and are often misunderstood. But to be honest, I am beginning to tire of references to them in books of theology. In English studies, Derrida has been out of fashion for more than a decade now, and I am hoping that the “critical” fire will soon die out in theology, along with all the breezy references to “postmodernism.”
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Micah Mattix is a Lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the review editor of The City, a new journal of Christian thought from Houston Baptist University. He and his wife are members of the Church of the Apostles (AMiA) in Raleigh, North Carolina. They have four children.
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