Introduction from 2021

Towards a Faith Beyond Belief

Atheism for Lent is a decentering practice designed to help you navigate the destabilising, yet emancipatory dimension that is housed in the theological event known as the Death of God.

While the Apostle Paul was the first to assert the death of God as something with universal, emancipatory significance, it was Nietzsche who most famously revived this insight for the modern world. Like Paul, Nietzsche proclaimed that this torturous event was a liberating one that each of us must pass through.

Paul, the Ambassador of Christ, and Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ, united in preaching the Good News of Good Friday.

It is precisely this scandalous idea that the gatekeepers of confessional theology and modern atheism reject - either God is real and cannot die, or isn’t and cannot die. For both, the notion of participating in God’s death is poetic at best and nonsense at worst.

In contrast, Atheism for Lent is a practice that employs some of the deepest philosophical and theological resources to help you not only understand what this death of God means, but to invite you into an experience of its transformative power.

Content

For each day of Lent you’ll get access to a reflection, along with lots of supplemental material for those who wish to go deeper. The material includes a carefully curated treasure trove of articles, podcasts, book excerpts and videos. Each week builds on the last to guide the participant deeper into the experience. People you will directly engage with include Aquinas, Anselm, Paley, Kant, Flew, Hume, Pascal, Meister Eckhart, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Freud, Sartre, Goldman, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Altizer, Tillich, Boothby, Caputo, Zizek and McGowan.

As part of this year’s practice I will be including advance access to a series of videos which offer a glimpse into what a church might look like that is forged on the principles of pyrotheology. These videos include music from Duke Special, poetry from Padraig O Tuama and a short film by Helen Rollins.

On top of this I will be giving seven live talks to introduce each Sunday at 10am PST, 6pm GMT. These can be engaged with live or watched later. There will also be a Whatsapp group for people to discuss the readings.

For those who particpated last year, at least 20% of the material will be different from 2024.

dates

5th March - 17th April (with an introductory live video on 2nd March)

How to join

Atheism for Lent is open to everyone who supports me on Patreon at the Blaze Level. You can also purchase the course as a one-off from Patreon, just click here and puchase the Atheism for Lent collection.