Every stroke a tennis player plays is different, yet we perceive them as playing in a distinctive and unique way. It's what Heidegger called a certain 'how' of existing. It's ultimately always singular, and the double task of (a) getting it in view and (b) communicating it to others will inevitably be marked more often by failure than success!

And this is also what he takes Christian doctrine, in all its complexity, to be centrally about, that is, teaching an attitude rather than a set of propositions. Call it joyous openness to life. What's not relevant about that?

Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways.

I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice.

Interpretation is a task that we repeatedly have to take up and start again from the beginning, Sisyphus-like. But, as Camus said, we must always imagine Sisyphus happy, and this is not so difficult when it's a matter of texts that reveal important truths about being human.

And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope.

Of course, it's always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling.