ABSTRACT
In a post-Heideggerian landscape, Lacoste notes that ‘the relationship between language and the event of being led to the suggestion that theology, if it must be true to its mission of “original and critical thought” must include the experience of prayer and elucidate it’ (HQD 16). Prayer provides a useful way of examining Lacoste’s theological and philosophical thought, which takes place in what has been described as a ‘postmodern context’1 (one usually characterized by the ‘end’ or the ‘overcoming of metaphysics’ as pronounced by Heidegger). Lacoste himself eschews the term ‘postmodern theologian’2 and is concerned with articulating what is, by his own account, an alternative account of religious experience, one in which ‘phenomenology, eventually, is also omnipresent’ (CP 657). ‘Theology’, writes Lacoste, ‘may encourage us to read biblical texts but is not the final word on them – theology is an act of listening to the biblical text, a silence that also enables prayer: “To read this text is to read before God; hence it is to make one’s reading a liturgy, a work of prayer”’ (PP 187).
