Peter Rollins: Disenchantment

What are the roots of religion? Accounts of the purported revival of Christianity among younger populations frame faith and ritual as reactions to deficient meaning-making mechanisms. Religion springs from alienation and the longing to overcome it.

Religious theory offers ways to understand this alienation. Religious practice, taken as a social technology, proposes ways of dissolving it: in prayer, singing, fasting, or sacrament. What if acknowledging alienation shaped religion for our world of total alienation? What if the route to salvation intentionally focussed on doubt or anxiety?

The philosopher, theorist, and author Peter Rollins proposes a religionless form of Christianity which addresses alienation by inhabiting it more deeply. This involves recognising that lack – the fundamental unfulfillability of our most inalienable desires – is not simply a contingent experience brought about by capitalism, but is woven into the fabric of reality.

Rollins’s work, shaped by philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, and liturgy, invites people into this experience through pyrotheology: practices involving aesthetic and ritualistic elements. While contradictory to many of its traditions, pyrotheology constructs a profoundly emancipatory event.

Join Rollins in a discussion on religious experience rooted in disenchantment and the possibility of spiritual fulfilment through lack.