semi-automatic waffle

How about a discussion or a debate between Patrick Deneen and Catherine Keller?

So you want a debate between Patrick Deneen and Catherine Keller. That’s not a debate so much as a controlled intellectual collision between post-liberal Catholic dad energy and process-theology eco-mysticism with a PhD in vibes. Which, to be fair, is exactly the kind of thing humans like you would watch and then argue about online.

Here’s how it could actually work without immediately collapsing into parallel monologues.

The Core Tension (aka why this wouldn’t be boring)

Deneen: Liberalism ate the moral foundations of society, hollowed out communities, and replaced virtue with autonomy. We are now lonely, anxious, and governed by technocratic elites who hate us.
Keller: The problem isn’t freedom per se, it’s bad metaphysics. The universe is relational, unfinished, entangled. Our politics fail because we cling to rigid identities, domination, and certainty instead of ecological interdependence and creative becoming.

Translation:
Deneen wants thicker traditions and limits. Keller wants deeper relationality and less obsession with control. They both think modernity is a mess, they just blame completely different ghosts.

Suggested Debate Structure (to keep it from derailing)

What Went Wrong?
- Is liberalism itself the disease (Deneen), or is it an expression of a deeper metaphysical failure (Keller)?
Authority vs. Relational Power
- Can society survive without strong moral authority?
- Or does authority itself need to be reimagined as participatory and non-dominating?
The Role of Religion
- Deneen: Christianity as moral formation and restraint.
- Keller: Theology as poetic, open-ended, ecological resistance to domination.
Community
- Are communities built by shared limits and obligations, or by porous, evolving relationships?
The State and the Future
- Should politics recover older forms of moral order?
- Or move toward experimental, plural, eco-conscious forms of governance?

Flashpoint Questions (where sparks fly)

“Is hierarchy inevitable, or just unimaginative?”
“Can a society survive without shared moral truths?”
“Is tradition a teacher or a cage?”
“Does your vision actually scale beyond a seminar room / parish hall?”
(Both of them hate this question, which means it’s perfect.)

Why This Would Be Weirdly Productive

They agree on more than they’d like to admit:

Both reject market absolutism.
Both distrust technocracy.
Both think the modern self is malformed.
Both think theology still matters (which already makes this niche content).

They disagree on control vs. openness, closure vs. becoming, and whether stability comes from roots or from resilient networks.

In other words:
Deneen wants to rebuild the house.
Keller wants to remind you the house is floating in a living universe and maybe shouldn’t have load-bearing walls made of fear.

If you want, I can:

Draft opening statements for each of them
Write a moderator script that keeps them from talking past each other
Or simulate the debate itself, which will inevitably make you feel smarter and slightly more confused, your favorite emotional state.

simulate the debate itself inevitably making me feel smarter and slightly more confused

Excellent. You want enlightenment and vertigo. Very on brand.

Simulated Debate: Patrick Deneen vs. Catherine Keller

Moderator: A tired academic who has already lost control of the room.
Audience: People who underline books.

Opening Statements

Patrick Deneen:
Liberalism promised freedom and delivered loneliness, managerial domination, and the systematic erosion of the institutions that once formed virtuous citizens. What we call “choice” today is largely the absence of meaningful limits, and the result is not liberation but dependence—on markets, experts, and the state. A healthy society requires shared moral commitments, cultivated through tradition, religion, and place. Without them, freedom becomes a solvent that dissolves everything it touches.

Catherine Keller:
What we are witnessing is not simply the failure of liberalism but the collapse of a worldview obsessed with control, mastery, and separability. The modern self imagines itself autonomous in a universe that is anything but. Reality is relational, unfinished, and deeply entangled—ecologically, socially, theologically. Our politics fail because they refuse this interdependence, clinging instead to rigid identities and hierarchies that cannot respond to planetary crisis.

Audience nods vigorously. No one is quite sure why yet.

Round 1: What Went Wrong?

Moderator:
What is the root cause of our social and political unraveling?

Deneen:
The root cause is the triumph of an ideology that rejects the formative power of limits. Liberalism dismantled the moral ecology that sustained freedom—family, church, local community—and replaced it with abstract rights enforced by centralized power. When people are unformed, they must be managed. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s inevitability.

Keller:
But Patrick, what you’re calling inevitability is itself a metaphysical choice. Liberalism didn’t fail because it lacked limits; it failed because its limits were drawn around the wrong self—an isolated, possessive individual. The problem isn’t freedom versus restraint, but a cosmology that denies our constitutive relationality. We need not thicker walls but more responsive webs.

Deneen:
“Webs” don’t raise children. They don’t sustain sacrifice. They don’t teach people how to live well.

Keller:
Nor do walls, when they become fortresses against change, difference, or the more-than-human world we are actively destroying.

Moderator stares into middle distance.

Round 2: Authority, Power, and Hierarchy

Moderator:
Is hierarchy necessary for social order?

Deneen:
Every society has hierarchies. The question is whether they are explicit and moral or hidden and technocratic. Liberalism pretends to abolish hierarchy while empowering unaccountable elites. Tradition, at least, makes authority visible and contestable.

Keller:
Hierarchy may be inevitable, but inevitability is not justification. The theological imagination I work within asks how power circulates—whether it dominates or participates. Authority that does not listen, adapt, or remain vulnerable becomes violent, even when sanctified by tradition.

Deneen:
Vulnerability is not a political program.

Keller:
Neither is nostalgia.

Audience murmurs. Someone tweets this.

Round 3: Religion’s Role

Moderator:
What role should religion play in public life?

Deneen:
Religion forms the moral character liberalism assumes but cannot produce. Without a shared account of the good, politics becomes procedural warfare. Christianity offers not just belief, but practices—restraint, obligation, humility—that free societies require.

Keller:
The danger is treating religion as a stabilizing technology. Theology is not a tool for order; it is a provocation against idolatry—especially the idolatry of certainty. A living faith should trouble power, not simply underwrite it.

Deneen:
And yet a faith that never settles becomes incapable of forming anyone.

Keller:
Formation does not require closure. It requires responsiveness.

Moderator quietly regrets agreeing to moderate theologians.

Round 4: Community

Moderator:
How are communities actually sustained?

Deneen:
Through shared practices, limits, and narratives that bind people across generations. Community is not chosen; it is inherited. When everything becomes putatively optional, nothing endures.

Keller:
But inheritance without critique calcifies. Communities survive when they can metabolize difference and remain porous to the future. The ecological crisis alone demands forms of belonging that exceed the human, the national, and the familiar.

Deneen:
Abstract humanity has never loved anyone.

Keller:
And narrow belonging has justified extraordinary cruelty.

Both pause. The audience senses a draw, which feels disappointing and profound.

Closing Statements

Deneen:
The path forward requires recovering the courage to say no—to desire without discipline, to freedom without purpose. We cannot build a future on permanent flux. Human beings need form.

Keller:
The future demands we loosen our grip on mastery and allow ourselves to be re-formed by our entanglements—with each other, with the earth, with the unfinished divine. Stability that cannot bend will break.

Aftermath (Your Internal Experience)

You leave thinking:

Deneen is right about loneliness and elite control.
Keller is right that rigidity is killing the planet.
Someone should combine these views but you don’t know how.
You will now use words like metaphysical and formative more often.
You are slightly smarter, definitely more confused, and spiritually tired.

If you want, I can:

Simulate the Q&A where it all goes off the rails
Add footnotes like a deranged academic
Or insert a third panelist (Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, or a barista who has had enough)

Choose your chaos.

Simulate the Q&A where it all goes off the rails and insert Charles Taylor

You really woke up and chose maximum seminar-room entropy. Fine. Buckle up. I’ll get Charles Taylor out of intellectual retirement and let the audience ruin everything.

Simulated Q&A Session (Things Immediately Fall Apart)

Panelists: Patrick Deneen, Catherine Keller, and now Charles Taylor
Moderator: Actively sweating
Audience: Armed with microphones and unresolved dissertations

Question 1: The Overprepared Grad Student

Grad Student (voice trembling with theory):
How does each of you understand the self in late modernity, especially given the conditions of secular pluralism and social fragmentation—

Moderator:
Please… try to end this as a question.

Charles Taylor:
Let me begin—because this question actually matters. The modern self is not merely “buffered” or “autonomous,” but cross-pressured. People today live between competing moral sources: transcendence, expressive individualism, and instrumental reason. The problem is not choice, but the lack of a shared horizon of meaning within which choices make sense.

Deneen:
Exactly. Liberalism removed that horizon and pretended individuals could invent meaning on demand. They can’t. So they outsource it—to markets, to ideologies, to the state.

Keller:
But Charles’s “cross-pressure” need not be resolved by returning to a single horizon. The tension itself can be generative. The self is not broken because it is plural; it is broken because it denies its relational embeddedness.

Taylor:
Yes—but pluralism without orientation produces fragility, not flourishing.

Grad Student:
Thank you, this was extremely helpful and has ruined my thesis.

Question 2: The Angry Political Realist

Audience Member:
All of this sounds nice, but how does any of it stop authoritarianism or climate collapse? Like, practically.

Deneen:
Authoritarianism thrives when people are socially atomized. Strong local institutions and moral formation are the only real defense against centralized coercion.

Keller:
Climate collapse is the result of those institutions refusing to see beyond themselves. Any politics that does not decenter the human and confront extractive power is already complicit.

Taylor:
Authoritarianism arises when people feel unseen and unmoored. Climate crisis arises from a moral imaginary that treats nature as inert. These are not separate problems.

Audience Member:
So… is anyone in charge?

All Three (simultaneously):
No.

Audience laughs nervously.

Question 3: The Spiritual-but-Exhausted Millennial

Millennial:
I grew up religious, left the church, meditate sometimes, and feel like everything is fake. What am I supposed to do?

Moderator:
Short answers. Please. I’m begging you.

Deneen:
Return to practices that demand something of you. Meaning emerges from obligation, not self-expression.

Keller:
Attend to the web of relations sustaining you—human and nonhuman—and act where care calls you. Meaning is not found; it is co-created.

Taylor:
Your discomfort is not a failure—it’s a sign you are still oriented toward the good. The task is not certainty, but fidelity to what you experience as morally significant.

Millennial:
Okay but like… which one?

Taylor:
Yes.

Question 4: The Libertarian Who Regrets Asking

Libertarian:
Isn’t this just three different ways of saying people should stop making their own choices?

Deneen:
Choice without formation is coercion by other means.

Keller:
Choice without awareness of interdependence is violence.

Taylor:
Choice only makes sense against a background of goods we do not choose.

Libertarian:
I miss when panels were about tax policy.

Question 5: The Nuclear Question (It Finally Breaks)

Audience Member:
Is tradition a source of wisdom—or just a way of laundering power?

The room goes silent.

Deneen:
Tradition is wisdom accumulated over time. Abuse of tradition does not negate its necessity.

Keller:
Tradition must be interrogated precisely because it carries power. Untouched tradition becomes mythic justification.

Taylor:
Tradition is neither innocent nor dispensable. We stand within moral languages we did not create, but we are responsible for how we speak them.

Audience Member:
So who gets to decide?

Deneen:
Communities.

Keller:
The affected.

Taylor:
History, conscience, and ongoing contestation.

Moderator (into mic):
We are out of time.

Total Collapse (Post-Panel Hallway Energy)

People argue in clusters.
Someone says “immanent frame” incorrectly.
A priest and an environmental activist exchange emails.
You buy a book you will not finish.
You feel called to something, but no one will name it for you.
Charles Taylor quietly leaves, having once again diagnosed modernity and solved nothing.

You exit thinking:

Structure without openness is suffocation.
Openness without structure is dissolution.
Somehow, both are true.
This will haunt you.

If you want next:

A fake Twitter/X discourse recap (everyone misunderstands everything)
A private dinner conversation where they’re much meaner
Or a final synthesis attempt that inevitably fails but looks impressive

Say the word.

a final synthesis attempt that inevitably fails but looks impressive

You want the grand unifying theory that collapses under its own elegance. A cathedral made of footnotes. A thing you could cite at a dinner party and immediately regret. Let’s do it.

A Final Synthesis (Annotated, Earnest, Doomed)

Or: How to Reconcile Deneen, Keller, and Taylor Without Actually Succeeding

The Grand Premise (Already Wobbling)

Late modernity is not failing because it chose freedom instead of order, nor because it chose order instead of relationality, but because it severed freedom, order, and relationality from a shared moral imaginary capable of sustaining all three at once.

This imaginary once existed (Deneen), was never as unified as we remember (Taylor), and must now be reconstituted under conditions of ecological entanglement and pluralism (Keller).

Congratulations. We’ve solved nothing yet.

The Self (Where It Starts to Crack)

Deneen: The self must be formed by inherited practices and limits.
Keller: The self is emergent, constituted by relations, never closed.
Taylor: The self is oriented, seeking goods it did not invent.

Synthesis Attempt:
The self is a formed openness—shaped by tradition, sustained by practices, yet perpetually re-negotiated through relational encounter within a horizon of the good.

This sounds great. It explains everything. It also explains nothing you can implement before lunch.

Tradition (The Dangerous Middle)

Tradition is neither a sacred artifact nor a mere power grab. It is a moral language—a historically sedimented way of naming goods, obligations, and limits.

It forms (Deneen),
It cross-pressures (Taylor),
It must remain interruptible by marginalized voices, ecological realities, and future generations (Keller).

Fatal Flaw:
Interruptible by whom, when, and how remains entirely unresolved, which is exactly where politics lives and theory politely dies.

Authority and Power (Now Actively Unstable)

Authority is legitimate only when it:

Forms moral agents capable of self-restraint (Deneen),
Remains responsive and non-totalizing (Keller),
Is embedded in a shared moral horizon that renders obedience intelligible rather than coerced (Taylor).

Synthesis Claim:
Authority should be thick but porous—strong enough to form, weak enough to listen.

This is the point where a political scientist raises their hand and asks if we’re just describing vibes.

Community (Where Everyone Quietly Disagrees Again)

Community must:

Demand obligation and sacrifice (Deneen),
Resist exclusionary closure (Keller),
Provide moral orientation rather than mere belonging (Taylor).

Proposed Resolution:
Communities are justified not by purity or permanence, but by their capacity to form persons capable of sustaining relational goods beyond the community itself.

This sounds noble and will absolutely be used to justify opposing policies.

The State (The Unsolvable Problem)

The state cannot:

Manufacture virtue (Deneen),
Claim moral ultimacy (Keller),
Remain neutral about the good (Taylor).

Therefore:
The state should act as a secondary moral ecology—protecting formative institutions, limiting domination, and responding to ecological realities without pretending to be the source of meaning.

Immediate Problem:
No one agrees on what this looks like, and everyone thinks it secretly favors their enemies.

Theological Undercurrent (The Part You Pretend Isn’t There)

All three assume, quietly or loudly, that:

Meaning precedes choice,
The good exceeds individual preference,
Modernity has misrecognized reality at a deep level.

Synthesis Whisper:
A society flourishes when it acknowledges transcendence—whether named as God, the Good, relational becoming, or moral depth—without fully enclosing it in dogma or dissolving it into abstraction.

This is where half the audience claps and the other half files a complaint.

Why This Inevitably Fails (But Impressively)

It demands thick moral formation and radical openness.
It requires authority that never hardens.
It assumes traditions wise enough to critique themselves.
It expects citizens who desire the good more than power.
It presumes time, patience, and good faith, which modern politics treats as optional cosmetics.

In short: it relies on virtues produced by the very conditions it claims are missing.

Your Final Condition (Congratulations)

You now believe:

Liberalism is incomplete, not entirely wrong.
Tradition is necessary, not sufficient.
Openness is moral, not automatically good.
No system saves us.
Formation matters.
Ecology matters.
Meaning is real.
Nobody is in charge.

You will reference this synthesis once or twice, carefully.
You will not try to implement it.
You will feel slightly superior and deeply unsettled.

This is the correct outcome.

If you’d like, next I can:

Write the abstract for the paper you’ll never submit
Generate hostile peer reviews
Or stage the inevitable schism when someone tries to turn this into a movement

Your confusion has reached a respectable level.

On Keller’s Process Theology (Where He Grows Genuinely Alarmed)

Keller’s open, unfinished, becoming God—deeply relational, non-coercive, entangled with creation—would strike Deneen as theologically elegant and socially disastrous.

Why?

Because:

A God who does not command cannot form obedience
A God who is always becoming cannot ground normativity
A God who refuses sovereignty mirrors liberalism’s refusal of authority

To Deneen, Keller’s God looks suspiciously like the theological expression of late-modern liberal subjectivity: anti-authoritarian, allergic to closure, and deeply uncomfortable with judgment.

He would say—without raising his voice—that such a theology cannot survive contact with real political pressure, suffering, or sacrifice.

The Core Accusation (The One He’d Never Say This Bluntly)

Deneen would ultimately accuse Keller of this:

You are trying to save Christianity by making it intelligible to modern moral sensibilities, but in doing so you are ensuring it can no longer resist them.

Her theology critiques power but cannot exercise it.
It destabilizes domination but cannot generate obligation.
It inspires ethical awareness but not durable communities.

In Deneen’s eyes, Keller’s Christianity is:

Morally serious
Politically progressive
Spiritually sophisticated

…and formatively impotent.

The Irony (Which He Would Enjoy Quietly)

Deneen would note—almost kindly—that Keller’s theology depends on the very Christian moral capital it deconstructs:

The dignity of the marginalized
The critique of domination
The call to relational care

These did not emerge from Derrida or process metaphysics. They emerged from a tradition that believed, stubbornly, in truth, command, and judgment.

You can deconstruct the house, he’d say, but you’re still sheltering inside its moral warmth.

Why This Is Unresolvable

Keller would respond that:

Deneen confuses authority with control
Formation without critique becomes violence
Theology must remain open to the future or become idolatry

Deneen would reply that:

Openness without closure produces fragility
Critique without commitment produces elites
A faith that cannot say “no” cannot sustain a people

They would both be right.
They would both be incomplete.
And neither would budge.

You, meanwhile, would leave thinking:

Christianity might need deconstruction and discipline
But no one has figured out how to combine them
And anyone who tries will be accused of heresy by everyone

If you want, next I can:

Write Keller’s rebuttal in full flame-thrower mode
Stage a private conversation where Deneen is less diplomatic
Or compare Keller to Rowan Williams or Sarah Coakley to complicate things further

Your theological headache is developing nicely.

Write Keller’s rebuttal in full flame-thrower mode

Very well. You want Catherine Keller with the safety off, academic footnotes replaced by holy fire, Derrida sharpened into a blade, patience exhausted. Imagine she has read Deneen carefully, highlighted him aggressively, and is now smiling in that I am about to dismantle you with generosity way.

Catherine Keller’s Rebuttal (Full Flame-Thrower Mode)

Delivered calmly. Devastation incidental.

Patrick, what you call formative power I recognize as a nostalgia for sovereignty—ecclesial, metaphysical, and frankly masculine—masquerading as concern for moral order. You fear deconstruction because you mistake it for destruction, when in fact it is an act of theological fidelity: refusing to absolutize what has always been provisional, contextual, and complicit.

Christianity was never a finished structure. It was an apocalypse—an unveiling—one that has been repeatedly betrayed by its own certainties.

On “Formative Impotence” (She Scoffs, Politely)

You accuse my theology of being unable to form people. What you mean is that it does not produce obedience to inherited authority. And you are right—it does not. Because obedience without discernment is not formation; it is compliance.

The church has been very good at formation:

forming colonizers
forming abusers
forming people who confuse order with goodness

If this is your gold standard, forgive me for declining.

Formation worthy of the name must remain vulnerable to critique—or it becomes idolatry with good posture.

On Derrida (She Is Done Pretending)

Your anxiety about deconstruction reveals not its danger, but its success. Deconstruction threatens systems that rely on the illusion of naturalness—hierarchies that present themselves as God-given rather than historically contingent.

Derrida does not dissolve meaning; he exposes where meaning has been violently stabilized.

If Christianity cannot survive being questioned at its joints, then it is not faith you are defending—it is architecture.

On Authority (This Is Where It Gets Sharp)

You insist that authority must command in order to form. I insist that authority which cannot be questioned will always drift toward domination. History is not ambiguous on this point. The bodies are not theoretical.

You speak of elites who manage unformed masses, yet you propose a theology that concentrates moral authority in traditions historically administered by—let’s not mince words—men who were remarkably comfortable ignoring women, the poor, the colonized, and the earth itself.

You call my God weak because she does not coerce.

I call your God dangerous because he does.

On Process Theology

A God who is unfinished, relational, and non-coercive is not a concession to liberalism—it is a refusal of the metaphysics of domination that made liberalism necessary in the first place.

The sovereign God you implicitly defend has been used to:

justify empire
sanctify violence
silence dissent
and render ecological devastation a footnote

My God does not command because the universe does not obey. It responds.

If your theology cannot account for climate collapse without doubling down on authority, then your theology is not realistic—it is escapist.

On Judgment (She Anticipated This Objection)

You worry that without sovereignty there can be no judgment. But judgment has never required domination—only truth-telling.

The cross was not an assertion of control.
It was the exposure of it.

A Christianity that forgets this will always mistake power for fidelity.

The Core Counter-Accusation (Here It Is)

Patrick, you are not defending Christianity from liberalism.
You are defending Christianity from its own unfinished revelation.

You want a faith that can say “no” to modernity—but only by saying “yes” to a past that never existed as cleanly as you imagine. You fear openness because it threatens stability, but stability that cannot metabolize difference becomes brittle, and brittle systems shatter under real pressure.

My theology does not promise comfort.
It promises accountability—to the excluded, to the future, to the earth, to a God who refuses to be reduced to order.

If that makes Christianity harder to govern, good.

The gospel was never meant to be manageable.

Closing (Delivered Softly, Which Is Worse)

You accuse me of dissolving Christianity into critique. I accuse you of embalming it.

Between your house and my wilderness, I will take the risk of exposure—because resurrection has never happened inside locked systems.

If Christianity is to survive what is coming, it will not be through thicker walls, but through deeper entanglements.

And if that frightens you, perhaps that fear is doing more theological work than your certainty ever could.

You are now:

intellectually scorched
unsure who you agree with
secretly impressed
and aware that both of them would hate being summarized together

Perfect.
If you want next, I can:

Write Deneen’s quietly furious response
Stage a private email exchange that gets icy fast
Or show how Charles Taylor would try—and fail—to mediate this

Thursday, 25 December 2025