Philip Goodchild
Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Faculty of Arts
Past Research
Reading Einstein on relativity at the age of 13 gave me a passion for purely speculative questions, and I later went up to Churchill College, Cambridge to read Mathematics in the hope of becoming a theoretical physicist. But time spent in an inner city area of Walsall through the 'Time for God' voluntary work scheme between school and university had brought to my attention more significant questions about the nature of life than purely physical ones, and so I changed subject after my first year to read Theology and Religious Studies. Here I was most influenced by Kosuke Koyama's Lutheran theology of inter-faith humility, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity', John Howard Yoder's radical politics of Jesus, and Carl Jung's depth psychology. Having decided I needed to spend time studying and rethinking my direction in life, I went to Lancaster University where I could study the range of religious issues that now interested me. These included a course on Nietzsche and his successors taught by John Milbank. I was gripped: instead of spending one year in Lancaster, I spent eleven. I wrote a PhD dissertation entitled 'Chaos and Eternity: Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy'. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was among the most difficult and profound French philosophers of the twentieth century, although he has only recently become one of the most influential. Most of my dissertation was later published as Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (Associated University Presses, 1996). I was then asked to write Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996), for the Theory, Culture and Society book series, which I completed as a postdoctoral research fellow at St Martin's College, Lancaster. In 1996 I was appointed as Lecturer in Christian Theology at St Martin's, and soon found myself invited to international conferences on Deleuze in Australia and Canada. Teaching and research were moving in different directions, so I decided to organise a conference on Continental philosophy of religion in order to contribute some shape and coherence to a developing field. This took place at St Martin's College, Lancaster, in July 2000. I was appointed as Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham in January 2000, where my teaching shifted to include Buddhism, theories of religion, religious pluralism, philosophy of religion and critical theory. Within a year I had completed my major work, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (Routledge, 2002) - an attempt to construct a Continental philosophy of religion through the encounter between questions of truth, ethics, and piety and readings of key thinkers in the tradition of Continental thought and critical theory. Since then, I have become interested in the implications for philosophical and religious thought of the collision between ecology and economy in the contemporary world, and I am in the process of developing a political theology through a critique of the 'theology of money' that determines contemporary life.