Dr Andrew Hass

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Religion Stirling, FK9 4LA

Dr Andrew Hass

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About me

As a teacher and researcher in Religion, I operate in an interdisciplinary space. This is a space from which I began: I joined Stirling in September 2003 after studies in English (BA) and Theology (MTh), both within Canada, a PhD at the Centre For the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts in Glasgow, and a position as the Carolyn Grant Fay Visiting Associate Professor in Religion and Literature at the University of Houston in Texas. At each of these steps I have advanced interdisciplinary lines of enquiry which, though starting from religious or ethical questions, necessarily run through other disciplines, discourses and modes of expression: philosophy, the arts (literature, drama, painting, music), hermeneutics, critical theory, ethics, sociology, and science. This approach is encapsulated in the Critical Religion framework that we have developed here at Stirling, an internationally recognized research paradigm that informs all my teaching and scholarship. I am also the General Secretary of the International Society of Religion, Literature and Culture, a network of global scholars seeking to interrogate the limits and possibilities of religion through multiple discourses, in order to better address ethically and critically the pressing concerns of our complex world.

My research explores the intersection of religion with other conceptual and creative modes of enquiry. I am interested not only in how we think under the concept of religion, but in how we think the concept itself. “Religion” for me has a prismatic effect, in that what we channel through it becomes refracted into a spectrum of ethics, concerns, interests, discourses, ideas and creativities. Literature has been a constant in this regard: questions of textuality and interpretation, and the spaces opened up by the creativity of language, are central to my thinking (Oxford Handbook of English Literature & Theology, 2007). An emphasis on hermeneutical ethics is also a mark of my work, particularly as it raises philosophical issues in which text and theory collide. The spaces created here are necessarily interdisciplinary, and I have been thinking and writing from these spaces since the start.

My earlier work looked at the way religion and creative expression have been forged together within the modern philosophical context laid down by Kant (Poetics of Critique, Ashgate, 2003). I later extended this context to Hegel (Hegel and the Art of Negation, 2014). From this work on German Idealism I have exposed the crucial role that the notions of nothing and negativity have played in developing our modern social and cultural consciousness, particularly around religion and art. My close study of the poet and writer W.H. Auden, for example, constructs a history of ideas around the concept of One as it gives way in Western modernity to the potent concept of Nothing and its figurations (Auden's O: The Loss of One's Sovereignty in the Making of Nothing, 2013).

My present work places these ongoing concerns within the challenges of our global society, in which the progressive claims of secularity can no better hold than the universalising claims of religion. In my volume Sacred Modes of Being in a Postsecular World (2021) I explore with leading figures in religion, theology and the arts how the sacred might still find expression in a world where neither secular nor religious paradigms are stable, and where a poetics might offer a new, more globalising theological mode. Most recently this exploration has culminated in a collaborative monograph in which I and two European colleagues elaborate the features of a musicality constitutive to this mode, a music of theology (as opposed to a theology of music) that plays itself across language, space and silence (The Music of Theology: Language – Space – Silence, 2024). My follow-up single-authored monograph (Out of the Spirit of Music) will interrogate the poetics of this musicality further within the philosophically creative context of Nietzsche and his ethical challenges.

As a founding member of both the Critical Religion Association (criticalreligion.org) and the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (isrlc.org), I work in close association with a network of like-minded interdisciplinary scholars across the globe. I also maintain working connections with scholars of Humanities in China, Hong Kong and South Korea. I share a pressing concern with how these global communities in which we operate are being increasingly controlled and homogenized by the technoscientific mechanics of the digital/media revolution. I thus strive in all my research and teaching to bring the values of religious and theological traditions, and their corresponding scholarly disciplines, in line with a constructive critique of systems that challenge on levels both local and global. My research aim is that, in collaborative work with interdisciplinary networks of scholars, through shared projects and writings, a new creative mode of practice and thinking might be forged for the globalized twenty-first century, one that will bear upon the exigent (and existential) concerns we all face.

I thus welcome postgraduate research proposals in the following areas: religion within a globalising society; religion and the digital future; religion and literature; religion and the arts; religion and continental philosophy (German Idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, et al.), religion and critical theory; hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur, et al.); nothing and negation; and projects that interconnect these areas.