Advance Access publication January 11, 2006 ARTICLE Theology in Modernity’s Wake

When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gen-der, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. —Stanley Fish (2005) AS A CONSTRUCTIVE FEMINIST THEOLOGIAN whose work focuses on “the triumvirate ” and draws on “high theory ” including that of Jacques Derrida, this comment from Stanley Fish in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye. I position my comments against that backdrop. We are said to have arrived at the end of moder-nity, a turn of the cosmic clock supposedly marked by such milestones as the death of the subject, the demise of metanarratives, and the loss of con-fidence in reason. Jacques Derrida, among other continental thinkers, is often touted as a harbinger of “postmodernity, ” one mark of which is (ironically, perhaps, given the supposed demise of metanarratives) pur-portedly the return of the religious. As dubious as that claim may seem to those of us who study religion (when did religion disappear, exactly?), we must acknowledge that religion has gained a new prominence on th