Recent Publications
Joshua L.I. Gentzke, "Viral Visions & Dark Dreams: Ecological Darkness and Enmeshment in the Time of COVID-19," in Pandemic, Ecology and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, ed. Alexander J. B Hampton (London: Routledge), 2020.
Abstract
COVID-19 has ushered in dark times. It has also fostered a multivalent discourse that frames the ecological crisis within the mythopoetic imagery of darkness. In the following chapter, I place this emergent discourse in conversation with a subtradition of apophatic mysticism by exploring two sites where darkness is linked to ecology: Theodore Roethke's poetry and Jacob Böhme's visionary anthropology. I argue that Böhme and Roethke combine apophaticism with a form of erotic ecopoetics that resonates with the enmeshed reality that the virus unveils. In closing, I suggest that this ecopoetics offers resources for developing new modes of countercultural perception and an ethics of affect.
Joshua L.I. Gentzke, "Platonism and Modernity," Christian Platonism: A History, ed. Alexander J. B. Hampton, John Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Abstract
The present study approaches Platonism as a historically and culturally contingent mesh of dynamic and diverse ideas, practices, and images, which continues to unfold as a living dimension of the western social imaginary. Bracketing the question of whether late and postmodern Platonisms are “authentic” manifestations of the tradition, I explicate the ways in which the Platonism has been inserted into, defined, and rhetorically mobilized within contemporary philosophical conversations. After unpacking the critical reception of Platonism in late modern thought, I explore a particular point of entanglement between post-Christianity spirituality, ecocritical theory, and Platonism that is receiving renewed attention amidst the contemporary “turn to religion” in continental philosophy: apophatic or via negativa mysticism, a tradition with roots in Plotinian henology. Focusing on the reassessment of apophaticism and the interest that prominent “postmodernist” thinkers have shown in it, I complicate the notion that anti-Platonism is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophical and theoretical discourse. In closing I suggest that a new "dark" or "weird" Neoplatonism is emerging amidst post-anthropocene discourses of ecocriticism.
Joshua L.I. Gentzke, “Imagining the Image of God: Corporeal Envisioning in the Theosophy of Jacob Böhme,” Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism, ed. Peter J. Forshaw, (Leiden, Boston: Brill), 2017.