ABSTRACT
Should there be a list of the most influential brokers of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism in America, Professor John D. Caputo would rightly score close to the top. Having spent most of his academic career teaching philosophy at Villanova University, he was the one to invite Derrida in 1994 to Villanova to participate in a roundtable discussion; this event resulted not only in one of the most compelling introductions to Derrida’s work – Deconstruction in a Nutshell – edited and with a commentary by Caputo himself, but also inaugurated what were to become the most fruitful of Villanova’s biennial conferences on religion and postmodernism. Indeed, Caputo especially deserves credit for his contribution to the field of Continental philosophy of religion in the English language: According to Kevin Hart, he gave this discipline a high profile in American academic circles, although – as Hart once quipped – “perhaps not all analytic philosophers or all Catholic philosophers would thank him for expanding the field, rendering it more impure, and making it a good deal more lively”.1
