Was the fiftieth anniversary meeting a celebration of a vital philosophical society—or was it a memorial service held by the elders at the passing of a beloved old friend? Were we giving anniversary papers or eulogies?That question, a bit unnerving I admit, can best be approached by following the fortunes of “religion” at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The question of the state of Continental philosophy and religion “then and now” cannot elude the question of their future. That is why to address this question I must expand it—then, now, and then again tomorrow.1 Accordingly my essay has three parts. First (“then”), I will begin with what I will call the theological sources of “Continental philosophy” and of SPEP in particular, which was both a partial mirror—it could not be expected to reflect everything—and the instrument of the emergence of Continental philosophy in the United States in the middle of the last century. Next I turn to “now”: the state of the question today, which, as Dominique Janicaud complained, represents a “theological turn” in Continental philosophy.2 Finally, I will conclude with a third part, tomorrow, the future, what is starting to happen to religion and ethics in SPEP and Continental philosophy generally, which threatens (or promises, depending on where you stand on this point) to completely remake or even unmake it, precisely in reaction against the so-called theological turn.My thesis in the first part is that SPEP in particular and Continental philosophy in the United States generally were first nourished in originally religious and theological soil. This is a slightly paradoxical thing to say because if we look at the papers delivered in the first five years, from 1962 to 1967, we will see nothing of the sort, hardly any mention of religion at all.3 However, far from constituting evidence against my thesis, that fact is actually a part of my thesis.I want first to point out that there is nothing to be gained from exaggerating the theological dimension I propose to underline. There are obviously internal philosophical reasons for the emergence of Continental philosophy in the United States, without which nothing would have been possible. These internal reasons are nicely summarized in what John Wild called as early as 1955 “the breakdown of modern philosophy”:4 the discontent with the epistemologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century; the critique of metaphysics in the wake of Kant; the critique of Hegel launched by the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms; the intrinsic appeal of phenomenological ideas and, in those days, even more so, the tremendous popularity of existentialism, which the literary writings of Camus and Sartre helped to make part of the general culture. None of this need necessarily have anything to do with theology.My only point is that it did. That is because this discontent with modernity found an especially receptive audience among people who—like the founders of SPEP—were either theologically minded philosophers outright or philosophers who having been theologically minded had given it up and were looking for a successor form of thinking to their theological interests. They were seeking a post-theological form of thought that I am describing by saying that their philosophical interests were in a certain sense the becoming-philosophical of their theological concerns. The significant thing is not so much that they gave up theology, which they did in varying degrees, some more than others, but that in looking for a successor form they turned to Continental philosophy. If they turned to Anglo-American sources, they embraced not the then regnant Anglo-American analytic and positivistic philosophies but classical American thought: the work of William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience was and is a reigning standard in the philosophy of religion, and Whitehead's process philosophy (theology), which was then quite influential in no small part because of the work of Charles Hartshorne. From the start an important philosophical and political alliance was forged among Continental philosophy, American pragmatism, and the Whiteheadians in the Metaphysical Society of America, which later on blossomed in the “pluralist” group headed up by Bruce Wilshire and Charles Sherover, where pluralism mostly meant nonanalytic, that is, everybody except the analysts.Why would this be the case? One explanation is found in Kierkegaard, who fascinated everyone, whether theistic or atheistic, religious or not. One common denominator or family trait of Continental philosophers just might be the “E” in SPEP, the question of philosophy as an “existential” matter; a matter of personal passion; a form of life; a way, so to speak, to “save” ourselves, not by supernatural intervention but by the existential event. It is not an accident that Kierkegaard, arguably the central figure lying in the background of contemporary Continental philosophy, is, as Heidegger said, a “religious writer.” Heidegger, of course, betraying a brand of “anxiety” known as the anxiety of influence, was trying to brush off Kierkegaard in an attempt to deflect our attention from how much he had lifted from Kierkegaard without citation or at least without a dismissive citation.I will elaborate the first part of my thesis, somewhat artificially but conveniently, by looking in turn at the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish sources and resources of SPEP and Continental philosophy.Continental philosophy has been a central component in the philosophical curricula of most American Catholic colleges and universities ever since the Second Vatican Council. (The Second Vatican Council was convened on October 11, 1962, and the first meeting of SPEP was held fifteen days later, October 26, 1962.) A good half of the doctoral programs in the United States that offer programs specializing in Continental philosophy are to be found in Catholic institutions. Many prominent members of the movement have been Catholic or at least have Catholic origins. Philosophy Today, one of the first and most popular American journals in the field, was founded and edited by Robert Lechner, a Catholic priest, out of DePaul University, where it is still housed today under the editorship of David Pellauer and with which SPEP had a long and fruitful relationship. The reasons for this Catholic side are not hard to understand. Catholics, to borrow a phrase from Bruno Latour, have never been modern,5 and that was especially the case for Catholic European immigrants to a predominantly Protestant Anglo-Saxon country. Before Vatican Council II, Catholic colleges were insular institutions that served up an exclusive diet of neo-Scholastic and neo-Thomistic philosophy in an effort to inoculate themselves against “modernity” by enthusiastically embracing Leo XIII's call to return to Saint Thomas in Aeterni Patris. At the Catholic University of America, students were even asked to take an oath against “modernism,” which by no means should be understood as an oath to postmodernism.That world vanished in a surprisingly short time beginning in the mid-1960s. Even before the Second Vatican Council, Catholic colleges and doctoral programs had begun to cultivate a historical sense. They always devoted time to Greek philosophy and the history of philosophy generally—the English Jesuit Frederick Copleston's multivolume History of Philosophy was our trustworthy guide. Etienne Gilson had taught us all the need for a careful study of the neglected Middle Ages in order to understand the medieval Christian climate of Aquinas as distinct from the Greek world of Aristotle, from whom he was separated by a millennium and a half, a pre-Christian culture and a Latin translation. When the hegemony of neo-Thomism was finally broken, two things happened. First, Catholics literally put Saint Thomas in his place, converting him from a timeless ahistorical master to a historically situated thirteenth-century thinker, filled in the missing link of the Middle Ages in standard histories of philosophy, and then went on to cultivate a strong historical consciousness (against which the oath against modernism had been directed). Second, led by major figures at the Jesuit institutions, Catholics took up their Continental European heritage in a sustained way, in search of contemporary resources to think their way through this brave new post–Vatican II world. They embraced the existentialism and phenomenology then enjoying heady days in the United States. James Collins, a Catholic layman at the Jesuit St. Louis University, who had written a major history of modern philosophy, wrote two widely read books—one on Kierkegaard and the other on existentialism—that were staples of the movement.6 Wilfrid Desan, a Belgian philosopher who had taken a Ph.D. at Harvard, began writing books about and teaching the work of Jean-Paul Sartre at Georgetown University, the Jesuit university in Washington, D.C.7 Desan introduced Americans to what we used to call “atheistic existentialism,” as opposed to the “Christian existentialism” of Gabriel Marcel, which we also greatly loved. Thomas Langan, a Catholic at Toronto trained at the Institut Catholique, wrote two of the first books in English on Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.8 This enthusiasm for existentialism and phenomenology made perfect sense. Catholics were philosophers with a religious tradition that had Continental European roots, and they found no nourishment in positivism and analytic philosophy, which seemed like an Anglo-Saxon version of neo-Scholasticism, more dry and bloodless technical work. So they readily turned to the philosophers of “concrete existence” and to the phenomenological movement that encouraged a return to the Lebenswelt. Continental philosophy was cut to fit the intellectual tradition and growing historical consciousness of Catholics.I also want to point out that there is a kind of natural migration from Aristotle to phenomenology. This is, of course, in a word, the path of Heidegger's Denkweg; Heidegger made his way into phenomenology from an ultraconservative, Catholic German neo-Scholastic world and would come to see in Aristotle the greatest phenomenologist of antiquity. Heidegger's work was in no small way a reinvention of Aristotle by way of phenomenology and a reinvention of phenomenology by way of Aristotle. This is also the path—and I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough—of John Wild, who made exactly the same migration. Notice the title of chapter 7 of Wild's The Challenge of Existentialism: “Realistic Phenomenology and Metaphysics.” Many Catholics made their first contact with John Wild as a realist, when they were being dutifully trained in Aristotelian realism by reading Wild and Francis Parker, with whom Wild collaborated. After Vatican Council II, many Catholics moved from the realism of Aristotle and Aquinas to phenomenology, just as Wild himself had done and just as Heidegger himself had done before that, even as Husserl had appropriated the medieval notion of esse intentionale developed by the ex-priest Franz Brentano. The movement is quite natural, and it results in a form of phenomenology that is free from the transcendentalism that beset pure Husserlian versions of phenomenology.It is no surprise that of all the philosophers Catholics read, Heidegger enjoyed pride of place, aided by a wave of English translations and by the landmark study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, the well-known book by William Richardson, a Jesuit philosopher then at Fordham University who would move on to Boston College in 1981 and expand his interests to include Lacan.9 When Catholic philosophers read Being and Time it all made perfect sense and sounded just like what they who were wary of modernity had been looking for all along. When Heidegger criticized Descartes's idea of a worldless subject and his reduction of the world to res extensa, when Heidegger said that the question of the existence of the world when it is raised by a being whose being is being-in-the-world makes no sense, this resonated with the Aristotelian and neo-Thomistic sensibilities of Catholic philosophers. Raised as “realists,” with an Aristotelian sense that the soul is the form of the body, that all knowledge begins in the senses, that human being is embedded in the order of natural being, and that the world is always and already there, Catholics were a perfect audience for the analytic of Dasein. When Heidegger said that as soon as Dasein comes to be it finds that it is already there, that made instant sense to Catholic realists.10 They had been critical of modern Cartesian epistemology for decades,11 and here was Heidegger—he himself a onetime Catholic nurtured like them in neo-Scholasticism—putting that argument on the map of contemporary philosophy in an original and magisterial way.While Catholics signed on to the distinction between church and state, they just could not embrace the modernist worldview, the whole idea of rigid territorial distinctions between faith and reason, sacred and secular, private and public, fact and value, subject and object, mind and body. These were modern distinctions, indeed modernist contrivances that had taken root in a Protestant culture, which they distrusted in their bones. When the early Heidegger came along with his critique of Cartesianism, and when the later Heidegger came along with his grand récit about modernity and the age of the Weltbild, even enlisting the Dominican friar Meister Eckhart in his cause, Catholics were all ears, and we understood it all perfectly. When Heidegger offered a critique of what he called “onto-theo-logic,” when he said that an atheism about the God of metaphysics, about the causa sui, was closer to the truly divine God, Catholics knew from firsthand experience what he was talking about.12 They had all been dragged through the pits of onto-theo-logic by the modernist neo-Scholastic manuals; they had had enough of it, and they wanted to “overcome” it. Catholics nurtured by a close reading of Aristotle and Thomas did not recognize themselves in any postmedieval philosophical movement until they encountered the concrete, intentionalist, and incarnational philosophies of the existential and hermeneutic phenomenologies.Pure reason and its critiques, pure, bloodless, transcendental subjects, religion within the limits of reason alone—all of that looked like a Protestant church with no statues! They had no taste for modernity's rigid divisions of labor, for its rigorous separation of science, ethics, art, and religion, which confined knowledge to representations inside our head—flying directly in the face of what they knew about intentionality—making ethics and religion into some sort of strictly private business. Philosophers who were nourished by premodern sensibilities were ready to be romanced by any movement that offered the opportunity not to be modern without appearing reactionary, antediluvian, or antimodern, which indeed was actually the latest word! That they found in existentialism and phenomenology, and they found it in Heidegger in particular. The welcome extended to the arrival of Continental philosophy in America by Catholic Ph.D. programs at one time included St. Louis, Marquette, Georgetown, Catholic University of America, and Notre Dame—all of which have in varying degrees since retreated from that commitment and adopted a kind of “analytic Thomism,” especially in ethics. That is because, while they found existentialism and phenomenology congenial, they were extremely suspicious of the turn taken in poststructuralism and also because the windows opened by Vatican II were gradually closed by later popes. But that is another story.13One can document these theological beginnings in the biographies of the prominent people in the movement. James Edie, a central figure in the original Executive Committee, had been a Benedictine priest and studied at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and did his doctoral dissertation at the Catholic University of Louvain on the work of Etienne Gilson.14 Indeed Calvin Schrag reports that the first time he met him Edie was still wearing his Roman collar. Edie would also co-edit a volume entitled Christianity and Existentialism.15 Joseph Kockelmans was a seminarian in Rome, although he was never ordained. Reiner Schürmann's career in the United State began as a Dominican priest teaching at the Catholic University of America. For many years, the laypeople teaching philosophy in Catholic universities were, like myself, former seminarians, priests, or members of religious orders. Some of us maintained our religious beliefs, and some of us mutated into secular “phenomenologists” or “existentialists.”It is probably true to say that the ultimate setting of the creation of SPEP was Harvard in the 1950s. The founding father of SPEP is John Wild (1902–1972), who taught at Harvard from 1927 to 1961 and who had spent 1931–32 in Freiburg hearing the lectures of Heidegger and Husserl. Wild's study of Heidegger came to fruition for him only after he read Merleau-Ponty, which sent Wild back to the sources and led him to give courses on Heidegger at Harvard.16 This occasioned his own shift from realism to phenomenology and his departure from Harvard to Northwestern, where he established one of the two major programs in Continental philosophy at the time outside the Catholic institutions, the other being the New School of Social Research. He stayed at Northwestern for only two years and then moved on to Yale, where a number of his students were to go on to distinguished careers in Continental philosophy. To Wild's presence at Harvard we should add the arrival of Paul Tillich in the United States, first at Union Theological Seminary (1933–55) and then at Harvard (1955–62; and finally at Chicago). Students at Harvard in the 1950s had the remarkable opportunity to study existentialism and phenomenology with Tillich and Wild.Calvin Schrag was one such student. He was Paul Tillich's teaching assistant at Harvard, and he wrote a dissertation on Heidegger and Kierkegaard, directed by Tillich and Wild (and he also notes meeting a young French exchange student at Harvard named Jacques Derrida). When Tillich spoke of religion as a matter of ultimate concern—let us say, as an ultimate Sorge—and of God as the “ground of Being” rather than a particular entity—let us say that Sein selbst is not to be confused with Seienden—he was articulating a radically new theology that drew deeply not only upon Hegel and Schelling but also on Kierkegaard and Heidegger (with whom Tillich taught at Marburg, in 1924–25). One of the most important effects of the theology of Paul Tillich was to help introduce Heidegger to a generation of American students. After a year in Germany, where he studied with Löwith and Gadamer, Schrag returned to Harvard to complete his dissertation. Writing in the preface to a book that he would write many years later (during the “theological turn”) entitled God as Otherwise than Being, Schrag says: “It should come as no surprise that it is difficult to write about Kierkegaard and Heidegger without having philosophical and religious topics and themes crisscross at rather crucial junctures. Thus in this very early work certain background interests that circumscribe the present project are already discernible.”17 Schrag's journey is a prism of the journey of many if not most of the original generation of SPEP. Allow me to mention a similar recollection made by Don Ihde, who was still a student at the time of the foundation of SPEP and is at present one of its distinguished elders. Ihde describes this scene very tellingly: “I got an M. Div from Andover Newton in 1959 before doing my philosophy Ph.D at BU, 1964. We had a consortium with all the local theological schools so I took most of my theology with Paul Tillich…. Cal Schrag was his assistant then, too…. I learned of Heidegger via Tillich. But even while an undergrad I was reading Kierkegaard, Marcel, Sartre, Tillich. I did my M. Div with a thesis on Nicolas Berdyaev” (e-mail correspondence, October 5, 2011).Along with Wild and Edie, Schrag was one of the five figures who founded SPEP, the first “Executive Committee” at the first meeting at Northwestern in October 1962. I have already noted that Edie had been a Catholic priest and that Wild was a man with theological interests, a background in Aristotle and Aquinas, who had written a book on “Christian philosophy”; as a biographical point, I note that his daughter Mary married Tillich's son René. There were two others. William Earle kept a safe distance from anything resembling confessional religion, but he had taken a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Charles Hartshorne, the leading process theologian of the day, and had a mystical streak.18 George Schrader (1917–1998) first came to Yale in 1939 as a student in the Divinity School, where he earned his B.Div. in 1942. From there he went on to do graduate work in philosophy at Yale, earning his Ph.D. in 1945. In all five cases, a theological project turned philosophical.It will not have gone unnoticed that every one of those of whom I have been speaking is a white Christian male. Aaron Gurwitsch and the group of Jewish phenomenologists and thinkers who had assembled in exile at the New School were not part of the first Executive Committee, but they had established the first beachhead of Continental philosophy in the United States, and their pure Husserlian brand of phenomenology was an important part of SPEP early on. The first debate to break out in SPEP took place between pure Husserlian “phenomenologists” and the “existentialists” about the name of the new society. Still, the New School philosophers showed very little interest in Jewish theology or religion. So even here, we must go back to John Wild, whose role in advancing the current interest in Levinas has been documented by Richard Sugarman, then a young Jewish student of Wild's at Yale and Florida in the 1960s, who was first introduced to the work of Levinas by Wild.19 Sugarman recounts the intense interest Wild showed in Levinas and the prescient grasp Wild had of the importance Levinas would eventually have. Wild also taught what was probably the first course in the United States on Totality and Infinity in 1971. According to Sugarman, Wild wrote a commentary on Totality and Infinity that “keenly anticipated” the changes Levinas would introduce in Otherwise than Being.20 Edith Wyschogrod also reports that the first course she took in philosophy was a course taught by Wild at the Harvard Summer School. With the mention of Edith Wyschogrod we come finally to the first theologically and religiously sensitive philosophical Jewish presence in SPEP. In her wake, a great deal of work has been done on Levinas, Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and others.21There was certainly broad participation in the formation of Continental philosophy in America by Jewish philosophers. Maurice Natanson wrote a series of books on Husserl and phenomenology and the social sciences. Hubert Dreyfus was a student of Wild's at Harvard and collaborated with Wild on an early but unpublished translation of Being and Time. Herbert Spiegelberg wrote the authoritative history of the phenomenological movement. Natanson, Spiegelberg, and Dreyfus were founding members of the board of editors of the Northwestern University Press series, which was edited by James Edie and, of course, bore the acronym “SPEP.” Edith Wyschogrod's husband, Michael, an expert in the Jewish–Catholic dialogue, had, like Calvin Schrag, also written a book on Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Maurice Friedman was writing about Martin Buber, whose I and Thou was something of a classic in those days. Marjorie Grene did important work on Sartre. Marvin Farber established the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Hannah Arendt famously enlisted J. Glenn Gray to serve as editor of the first series of Heidegger translations from Harper and Row. But until the ascendency of Levinas later on and the arrival of Edith Wyschogrod on the scene, SPEP did not directly engage the philosophical import of Jewish theology and the Jewish Scriptures.It was inevitable—with the insight granted by hindsight—that with this much theological questioning running in the background, Continental philosophy would take a “theological turn.” To be sure, such a turn may be regarded as skidding off the road and ending up in a ditch, which was the view of Janicaud, who coined the phrase, for whom it represents one more attempt to make philosophy a handmaiden of a theological agenda, which is the most consistent argument made against it. Or it may be regarded as a genuine renewal of what had been traditionally called the “philosophy of religion,” which is how it is embraced by those who involve themselves in it. Either way a new subdiscipline has emerged that for the most part is called “Continental philosophy of religion,” an expression that positions it as a rival and alternative to the reigning neo-Scholastic and analytic approaches.The Continental approach to the philosophy of religion is vastly different from the business as usual of philosophy of religion because it has displaced the standard debates about proofs for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the problem of evil with a new project, one that was conceived in the spirit of what the later Heidegger called “overcoming metaphysics” and the critique of “onto-theo-logic.” What theologians and philosophers of religion sensed in Heidegger's meditations on God and the gods, the holy and the divinities, was an acute religious sensitivity, an appreciation of the specific character of the religious, which in a letter addressed to the theologians Heidegger himself described as “non-objectifying thinking.”22 Whatever “God” means, God is not an object for a subject, not the referent of a propositional assertion, not the subject matter of a demonstration, all staples of “modernity,” which is why the theological turn is sometimes called “postmodern theology.” Heidegger is calling for a veritable paradigm shift in thinking about God, whose implications for the philosophy of religion, for theology, and for religion itself are considerable, indeed revolutionary. Of course, as with anything new, it is also very ancient. Its antecedents may be found in mystical theology, and Heidegger himself was deeply interested in Meister Eckhart.23 It is also found in Pascal's defense of the reasons of the heart and in Luther's critique of the crust of scholastic metaphysics that had been allowed to grow over the life of the New Testament, which must be submitted, as Luther said, to a destructio. This was almost certainly the source of Heidegger's use of the word Destruktion and served as a prototype for Heidegger for a project of a thinking bent on overcoming metaphysics in order to retrieve (wiederholen) the things themselves, the genuine substance (Sache) of the phenomena.24 The entire project of the delimitation of metaphysics has a religious model. If, as Marx thought, the prototype and paradigm of criticism are the critique of religion, the prototype and paradigm of nonmetaphysical and meditative thinking are also religious, and so it should not be surprising to see Continental philosophers taking a theological turn.Heidegger set out to release the “truly divine God” from its captivity by the dominant figures of “Being” that hold sway in the history of metaphysics. While for the young Heidegger, immersed as he was in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and the letters of Saint Paul, this described a Christian project, the later Heidegger had in mind the Greek divinities, and by nonobjectifying thinking he meant poetic thinking, not biblical. That was the basis of the critique of Heidegger, first by his contemporary Levinas, thinking from the Jewish tradition, and in the next generation by Jean-Luc Marion, working from the Catholic tradition, each of whom proposed alternate ways of thinking God “otherwise than Being” or “without Being.” Levinas and Marion are the central figures in the theological turn, and they are singled out for sharp criticism by Janicaud for just that reason. Levinas has been the subject of countless sessions at SPEP for several decades, while Marion was introduced to the membership in a plenary address he gave at SPEP in 1993 (Chicago) and has since been the subject of numerous studies, inside and outside the society.25 As Ricoeur's successor at the University of Chicago, Marion has built up a very considerable American presence.If today it is unremarkable to hear even very secular, elbow-patched philosophers discussing the “wholly other,” an expression borrowed from the darkest chambers of mystical theology, that is almost single-handedly the doing of Levinas. For Levinas, the liberation of God from Being was the definition of “ethics,” which Levinas himself called “metaphysics” (if Heidegger said something, Levinas felt duty-bound, bound by ethics, to say the opposite). Levinas meant that ethics alone breaks the crust of Being, which he called the sphere of the “same.” The ethical other breaches what we comprehend and pre-have in advance and exposes us to the “wholly other,” by which he meant not God but the “face” of the neighbor or the stranger, which is the “trace” that God leaves behind in withdrawing from the world (Being). Levinas radicalizes the ethics of neighborly love and hospitality in the Jewish Scriptures, by means of which he thought “first philosophy” could be revitalized and ethics returned to center stage in Continental thinking, a project in which he broadly succeeded. Marion's trope, “without Being,” is structurally similar to Levinas's, but Marion really does mean God, the God of mystical theology, whom he approaches in an