摘要：I should warn you that you are coming into the middle of a conversation between Catherine Keller and me . We have been writing (letters) to and about each other for a while and so sometimes links in this epistolary chain may appear in short - hand and in need of explanation. 1 I am not just trying to be c lever when I say that our relation ship is something of a coincidentia oppositorum and apophatic relational entanglement unto itself — Catholic and Protestant, male and female, philosopher and theologian, deconstructor of metaphysics and process theologian , just for starters. There ha ve been wars over such things, blood spilled. As Catherine Keller says, a lot of our differences are explained by our biographi es — I come from the Catholic tradition saturated with metaphysics, so when I heard about "overcoming metaphysics " and "deconstruct ing the metaphysics of presence" that had the lure of liberation for me , of the rogue, the radical, the outsider. Catherine c o me s from an anti - metaphysical Protestantism which gave metaphysics the lure of the prohibited other, especially if it took the form of a non - scholastic panentheistic process metaphysics, which set the hair on fire of m y Thomistic professors in college , from which they tried duly to inoculate me. O ver the course of our careers, we have been inching toward a center , finally t ouching finger tip s in a middle we both happily called " theopoetics , " in a piece we coauthored a few years .
