Its not big and its not clever - its just wierd

Now it could just be that I'm very thick, but I've just turned the pages on Fountain, J. Stephen, ‘Postmodernism, A/Theology, and the Possibility of Language as Universal Eucharist’ pp131-147 in Porter, Stanley E., (ed.) The Nature of Religious Language: A Colloqium (Roehampton Institute London Papers 1), Sheffield Academic Press, 1996 and I'm none the wiser.

We get all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff about, Thomas Altizer, the death of God, Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (1991) and Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake then this quotation from Raschke, Theological Thinking: An In-quiry (Atlanta, Scholar’s Press, 1988), p134):

'Book’ is etymologically connected to ‘beech’, an ‘edible tree’ (c.f. the Greek root phago-). Thus the book is the tree, the symbol of life, that is ingested as a sacrament. Reading in the classical context is akin to the celebration of the ‘mass’, the assimilation of meanings, the consumption of a god, the transfer of presence (p140)

If you thought interpretive maximalism was sometimes a bit on the creative side, how's this for left-field?

In the absence of the Father, the Author(ity), the reading of such writing enacts the presence of the (M)other... (p141)

When you start putting bits of words in brackets, I think it's all going to end it tears.

And the grand conclusion?

An understanding of the self-kenotic God, the God who is other-than-God, requires theology which is other-than-theology, a writing which is the total presence of apocalyspse, the embodiment of the God who is Word, a universal eucharist. (p146)

Why do people write this stuff? Does he know what he means? Does he think we will? Or perhaps we're not meant to?

Right, that's better.