Life happens to us in the middle of things. The middle is chaosmosic. It is an uneasy calm that is creative and awaiting a storm. It draws us into the impossible, where we have to face the truth of ourselves in our full nakedness. It is in the zone of the impossible where we have to open ourselves to an absolute horizon that remains open on all sides. Closed horizons take us into the possible zones where we can anticipate what is coming and thus offer a strategic response. Life in the open horizon does not have the luxury of knowing what is coming. One has no other defence then to fall on one’s original sacred nakedness that was lost by the sin of Adam and Eve. Coming into the impossible and unforeseeable zone, we stand along/hyphenate by Jesus Christ on the cross who hung naked for us and brought us into His life, transforming us into a new creation. It is only by faith and not by sight that we can live as pilgrims with uncertainties and insecurities of the world. Contents Foreword: Living Hyphenated Lives Acknowledgements Introduction: The Intermezzo of Life I. Life and Love: Encountering the Other 1. The Touch of a Text 2. Thinking Tears that Tear Us 3. Thinking the Nude 4. Towards the Hermeneutics of Hyphenation 5. Becoming All the Way 6. ‘Putting Our Belonging’ Under Erasure 7. Living in an ‘As-if’ Time 8. Between St Augustine and Jacques Derrida 9. What Does Love Look Like? 10. Encounter with the Wholly Other II. Philosophy and Paradoxes: Embracing/Enabling Impossibilities 11. Thinking Fullness and Emptiness Together 12. Between Martha and Mary 13. Sharing our Unshareability 14. Dying to Live 15. The Logic of Giving Without Giving 16. Choosing the Impossible 17. (Un)Thinking the Impossible 18. Living ‘Out of Joint’ 19. Beyond Saying and Unsaying Theologies 20. Reading Together: The Tower of Babel and the Pentecost III. God and Theology: Surrendering Joyfully 21. The God to Come 22. The Hydraulics of the Divine 23. The Geometry of Liturgy 24. Deconstructed by God 25. Walking by Faith and Not with Sight 26. Thinking Gift to Think Grace 27. Authorising Authority: Learning from the Gospel of Matthew 28. The Metanoetics of Jesus 29. Towards a Crucified Theology 30. At the Foot of the Cross IV. Living and Ending: Hyphenating Animals and Divine 31. Following the Animal Other 32. Apophatics of the Human and the Animal Binary 33. Deconstructing Our Lyconomy 34. Reading ‘the Dogs’ of the Texts of the Bible with Derrida 35. The Microbes Are. Therefore I Am 36. The Face of God in the Cat of Derrida and the BodhiT ree of Buddha 37. Facing a Post-human Earth 38. Spiritual Democracy of God’s Creatures 39. The Mysterium Convivium and the Gospel of Creation 40. Happy Livings and Happier Endings Open Endings References Glossary Index Rev. (Dr) Victor Ferrao holds a Doctorate in Philosophy of Science with a specialisation in Science-Religion Dialogue from the Faculty of Philosophy Jnana Deepa, Pune. He was Professor and Dean at Rachol Seminary and served with distinction for twenty years. He has served as the coordinator of the Special Study Centre of IGNOU at Rachol Seminary. He is the visiting professor at Rachol Seminary, Goa; Jnana Deepa, Pune; and St. Pius X College, Goregaon, Mumbai. He has authored six books and has edited the proceedings of annual conference of Association of Christian Philosophers of India (ACPI). He is the Founder Director of Science Religion Sangam, Goa and is actively involved in Science and Religion Dialogue. Organiser of National and International conferences, he is a regular columnist in Newspapers and Magazines in Goa. Gargi Mukherjee M.Phil, is pursuing her doctorate at Visva-Bharati Santi Niketan, Bolpur, West Bengal