Research Units

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The Trinitarian Ontology Network is an international and ecumenical network of researchers who study Trinitarian Ontology.   The study of being or ontology was once regarded as a seminal preparation for the study of God as the creative cause of all being in theology. Yet due to a series of theological mistakes, metaphysics came to be separated from the Trinity before God came to be conceived as the supreme being of all beings in general metaphysics, natural theology, and modern ontology. The analytic and continental philosophical traditions have since tended to treat the Trinity as, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, redundant to modern formal ontologies. Yet the postmodern collapse of all such formal ontologies has prepared the path for a renewed study of metaphysics or ontology that shares in participation with the Trinity. New Trinitarian Ontologies names a creative response to this pivotal collapse of modern formal ontologies. If ontology cannot contain but rather more radically points to God, and if all nature thus tends towards the supernatural, the angelic, and the metaphysical, then we should renew the study of the metaphysics or ontology of the Trinity. 

The Jesuit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit explores and develops a new Jesuit Cybernetic critique of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) (c. 1995–2000) for the purpose of renewing the hidden theological tradition of cybernetic theory in light of Trinitarian Ontology. While the CCRU approached cybernetics as a secular and inhuman acceleration beyond the “end of philosophy,” the JCCRU seeks to recover a vision and style of the Church that is spiritually engaged with computing across the Jesuit tradition — from Athanasius Kircher to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — and to reframe cybernetics' reciprocating feedback loops as radically centered upon Christ, the “divine pilot”.  This panel aims to recollect the lost theological ancestry of cybernetics from Plato to the present, and particularly its most advanced religious formation in the Jesuit lineage from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the combinatorial calculators of Athanasius Kircher to the “theo-dramatics” of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the “hyper-personal” apocalyptics of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  By contrasting this Jesuit lineage with post-Heideggerian cybernetics from Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler to Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Reza Negarestani, we will discover whether this “cybernetic crisis” leads to the “end of philosophy” or heralds a new religious turn in cybernetics.

Speculative Angelology is a theological science that studies the creation, orders, and function of the angels.  It began as a study among the earliest Christian theologians. From Philo to Peter Lombard, the angels had been studied as the first among creatures.  Fiery controversies once raged between the followers of Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus surrounding the individuation, communication, and location of the angels.  And even after Immanuel Kant’s critical turn against metaphysics, we may find, starting in Schelling and in Heidegger, a faint echo of the angelic in secular philosophy.  Yet the study of the angels has since Ockham and Schleiermacher increasingly come to be regarded with a foretaste of scientific incredulity as an uncanny and antiquarian interest, which ultimately amounts to little more than an inventory of the records, testimony, and opinions of thinkers from the theological past.  It has increasingly come to be studied in a reductive empirical register as it has come to curate the collection of evidence from the past to present as its last living thought systematic summaries of all that has hitherto been believed. The great philosophic questions of the origin, nature, and purpose of the angels, which Plato had asked and Origen addressed, appear today to have lost all urgency, and have more often come to be regarded as a question that could only but cannot ever be decided on the promised weight of any empirical evidence. In awaiting its impartial arbitration, we have suspended any judgment as to the truth of the angels, consigned their appearances to the witness of faith, and, in this faith, prematurely arrested any speculative advance for the study of the angels.