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This book reconceives theology as a musical endeavour in critical tension with language, space and silence. An Overture first moves us from music to religion, and then from theology back to music – a circularity that, drawing upon history, sociology, phenomenology, and philosophy, disclaims any theology of music and instead pursues the music in theology. The chapters that follow explore the three central themes by way of theory, music and myth: Adorno, Benjamin and Deleuze (language), Derrida, Rosa and Nancy (space), Schelling/Hegel, Homer and Cage (silence). In overdubbing each other, these chapters work towards theology as a sonorous rhythm between loss and freedom. A Coda provides three brief musical examples – Thomas Tallis, György Ligeti, and Evan Parker – as manifestations of this rhythm, to show in summary how music becomes the very pulse of theology, and theology the very intuition of music. The authors offer an interdisciplinary engagement addressing fundamental questions of the self and the other, of humanity and the divine, in a deconstruction of modern culture and of its bias towards the eye over the ear. The book harmonizes three scholarly voices who attempt to find where the resonance of our Western conceptions and practice, musically and theologically, might resound anew as a more expansive music of theology.

This article describes the development that led to the appointment of a professor in Islamic Theology and Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology, Uppsala University, and, at a later stage, to a renewed understanding of Systematic Theology, with two orientations: (1) Worldview Studies and Christian Theology and (2) Islamic Theology. The point of departure is earlier theoretical and methodological considerations by the authors concerning Islamic theology in a contemporary Nordic university setting. Mikael Stenmark was later to become the Dean of the Faculty of Theology, between 2008 and 2014, and during that period new courses in Islamic Theology and Philosophy were designed and Professor Mohammad Fazlhashemi was hired to lead the development of Islamic Theology and Philosophy. This is described in the first section of the article. In the following sections, the academic discipline in which Islamic Theology later was to be integrated, Systematic Theology, is described historically and theoretically in view of the broader work with rethinking the disciplinary structure of the Faculty of Theology during the period when Mattias Martinson was Dean, between 2014 and 2020. The article concludes with a reflection on the current situation and an outlook towards the challenges that a commitment to Islamic Theology entails at a Northern European state university.

In this article, I perform an experimental discussion of questions concerning revelation and truth in relation to the climate crisis. The concern is not revelation in any determinate theological sense but rather an attempt to reach for a perspective on truth that understands it as something that ruptures and disturbs the way we tend to think. I take my point of departure in a series of thinkers such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Foucault. The key turn of the argument, however, is to confront the critical theoretical discourse of these thinkers with Schelling’s notion of positive philosophy, which offers an interesting alternative perspective on the question of existence and truth compared with standard forms of critical theory. In view of Schelling’s positive philosophy, I argue that his reflection on revelation is meaningful to revisit in relation to the climate threat, and I make some experimental connections between this idea of positive philosophy and recent discussions about the Anthropocene, asking for a more profoundly self-critical approach to question how we can approach the dire problems that we face as humanity. I end with an example of such reflection in the writings of the feminist materialist Nancy Tuana.

In this essay I draw attention to conceptual similarities in Walter Benjamin's and Theodor W. Adorno's reflection about language, with special attention to Benjamin's 1916 essay about language as such, including its theological impulses. In Adorno's case, I concentrate on language theory as it comes forth in relation to his philosophy of music and the supposed language-character of music. I argue that this particular connection between Benjamin and Adorno is largely unexplored in the literature, and I show that their conceptual affinities have far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of Adorno's philosophy as a whole. Music is of fundamental importance for Adorno's critical theory, and this fact points to an intricate entwinement between materialism and theology, stemming from Benjamin's theory of language. Thinking of music as secularized prayer means to emphasize that music relates to reality in a way that resembles the logic of Benjamin's understanding of a pre-lapsarian language of divine names.