It is commonly presumed that the earliest recoverable writing of the New Zealand born Philosopher Arthur N. Prior is that published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology in 1937. Yet Prior was an extremely active writer as both an undergraduate and as a recent graduate, in a variety of publications. This paper recovers the unknown early Prior and discusses the importance of neo–orthodox Christian theology upon the life and thought of the early Arthur Prior. During the 1930s Prior (...) was primarily a theologian–philosopher and in these early writings there can be discerned important influences upon his thinking. This paper traces Prior’s writings from an early unpublished manuscript through his theological writings and the development of his neo–orthodox thinking to a point where preparatory work for his influential 1942 article ‘Can Religion be Discussed?’ occurs. It ends where Prior bibliographies begin, with a theologian–philosopher remaking himself as a philosopher theologian. Yet to understand the later Prior we need to understand his early life, thought and writing. This paper is an attempt to recover Prior’s early life and note his influences and talent in areas apart from tense logic. (shrink)

Radical theology offers a different way to interrogate and critique bourgeois capitalist society and its institutions. Almost always institutional in location and focus, radical theology recognizes that the traditional religious underpinnings of liberal bourgeois society and its institutions no longer continue to operate nor offer a workable foundational basis. We could say, _contra_ Habermas, that there is more than “the awareness” of what is missing; rather, what is missing is what is _necessarily_ missing because “the what” of God is dead. (...) The crisis of contemporary institutions is that, founded implicitly or explicitly on bourgeois religion and its God, they now find themselves with an ontological crisis most do not even recognize. Or rather, they recognize there is a crisis of meaning and purpose but are unsure or unwilling or even unable to engage with its foundational causes. Drawing on the weak thought of Gianni Vattimo, radical theology is empoyed as a way of rethinking institutions from within, against both their foundations and their current expressions, articulating a set of “weak possibilities” for ways forward. (shrink)