Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness

This monograph examines how Western thought has historically constructed and responded to radical otherness through three archetypal figures: strangers, gods, and monsters. Kearney traces these representations from ancient mythology through postmodern philosophy, arguing that each figure embodies fundamental anxieties about encountering the unknown and the limits of human understanding.

The work demonstrates how the divine Other has functioned as both the ultimate stranger and potential monster in Western consciousness. Kearney analyzes biblical narratives alongside Greek mythology to show how encounters with the divine consistently destabilize human categories of knowledge and identity. He argues that the God of Abraham appears precisely as the stranger who cannot be domesticated by human conceptual schemes, while simultaneously warning against the monstrous potential of absolutizing any representation of divinity.

Drawing extensively on continental philosophy, particularly the work of Levinas, Derrida, and Ricoeur, Kearney develops a "diacritical hermeneutics" that seeks to navigate between naive credulity and cynical skepticism regarding transcendence. This methodology attempts to preserve openness to genuine otherness while maintaining critical discernment about claims to divine encounter. The work engages substantively with postmodern critiques of onto-theology, acknowledging their force while resisting their tendency toward nihilistic conclusions.

Central to Kearney's argument is the notion of "anatheism" - a position that moves beyond both traditional theism and modern atheism to recover a space for the sacred after the critique of metaphysics. He contends that authentic faith requires passing through doubt and that the contemporary challenge is not choosing between belief and unbelief but learning to discern sacred possibilities within secular experience.

The monograph's significance lies in its sophisticated attempt to reconstruct religious imagination after deconstruction. Against both fundamentalist certainty and postmodern relativism, Kearney proposes a hermeneutical approach that remains genuinely open to transcendent possibility while acknowledging the historical violence done in the name of absolute truth claims. His work provides crucial resources for theologians and philosophers seeking to articulate divine encounter in a pluralistic context, offering a nuanced framework for distinguishing between authentic manifestations of the sacred and their ideological distortions. The text ultimately argues for a chastened but real openness to divine otherness that neither reduces God to human projection nor claims privileged access to absolute truth.