Has liberation theology reached a dead end? Has the time come to propose another strategy of political resistance, one that considers and takes account of the complexity of power relationships in daily life? How can we explore the deeper meaning of freedom and liberation? This book begins with a reflection on the “failure” of social movements and revolutions and a review of the methodologies of liberation theologies. Offering a brand-new micro-political theology, it attempts to demonstrate how Michel Foucault can help us recognize the limitations of our standard definitions of liberation. Continuing Foucault’s critical engagement with desire, sexuality, and the body, this book opens a fresh dialogue between Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology, Latin American liberation theology, and radical orthodoxy, leading to an exploration of how that dialogue can remind us that spirituality and the transformative practice of the self can themselves be fully political. It also urges prayer as both the radical root of political resistance and its action.

Has liberation theology reached a dead end? Has the time come to propose another strategy of political resistance, one that considers and takes account of the complexity of power relationships in daily life? How can we explore the deeper meaning of freedom and liberation? This book begins with a reflection on the "failure" of social movements and revolutions and a review of the methodologies of liberation theologies. Offering a brand-new micro-political theology, it attempts to demonstrate how Michel Foucault can help us recognize the limitations of our standard definitions of liberation. Continuing Foucault's critical engagement with desire, sexuality, and the body, this book opens a fresh dialogue between Althaus-Reid's indecent theology, Latin American liberation theology, and radical orthodoxy, leading to an exploration of how that dialogue can remind us that spirituality and the transformative practice of the self can themselves be fully political. It also urges prayer as both the radical root of political resistance and its action.

This book deals with the aftermath of the enlightenment and its legacy in the political, social, and racial context. It discusses the incomplete project of modernity in terms of social contract theory, racial justice issues, and political theology in the postcolonial context. Hermeneutical realism and cultural linguistic inquiry become substantial features in elaborating postcolonial political theology and its ethical stance against the colonization of lifeworld and its pathologies. A study of critical theory and political theology is of a reconstructive character in seeking to relocate critical theory and political ethics in the context of alternative modernities at the level of postcolonial theory.

In Christ and the Common Life Luke Bretherton provides an introduction to historical and contemporary theological reflection on politics and opens up a compelling vision for a Christian commitment to democracy. In dialogue with Scripture and various traditions, Bretherton examines the dynamic relationship between who we are in relation to God and who we are as moral and political animals. He addresses fundamental political questions about poverty and injustice, forming a common life with strangers, and handling power constructively. And through his analysis of debates concerning, among other things, race, class, economics, the environ­ment, and interfaith relations, he develops an innovative political theology of democracy as a way through which Christians can speak and act faithfully within our current context. Read as a whole, or as stand-alone chapters, the book guides readers through the political landscape and identifies the primary vocabulary, ideas, and schools of thought that shape Christian reflection on politics in the West. Ideal for the classroom, Christ and the Common Life equips students to understand politics and its positive and negative role in fostering neighbor love.

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

We express the mystery of God with diverse metaphors, but mostly in Adult terms. In this experimental theological adventure, Graham Adams imagines what might flow from a more thorough ‘be-child-ing’ of God. Aware that the Child can be idealized, he selects particular characteristics of childness in order to disrupt God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. The smallness of the Child re-envisages divine location in sites of smallness, like an open palm receiving the experiences of the overlooked. The weakness of the Child reimagines divine agency as chaos-event, subverting prevailing patterns of power and evoking relationships of mutuality. And the curiosity of the Child reconceives divine encounter as horizon-seeker, imaginatively and empathetically pursuing the unknown. These possibilities are brought into dialogue both with other theologies (Black, disabled and queer) and with pastoral loss, economic/ecological injustice, and theological education. Through these conversations, God the Child emerges not only as a new model for God, but intrinsic to God’s new social reality which is close at hand.

Focusing substantially on the relation between the concept of constitutionalism and Islamic Law in general and how such relation is specifically reflected in the Shiite jurisprudence, this volume explores the juristic origins of constitutionalism, especially in the context of 1905 Constitutional Revolution in Iran.

Much current commentary on climate change, both secular and theological, focuses on the duties of individual citizens to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. In A Political Theology of Climate Change, however, Michael Northcott discusses nations as key agents in the climate crisis. Against the anti-national trend of contemporary political theology, Northcott renarrates the origins of the nations in the divine ordering of history. In dialogue with Giambattista Vico, Carl Schmitt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and other writers, he argues that nations have legal and moral responsibilities to rule over limited terrains and to guard a just and fair distribution of the fruits of the earth within the ecological limits of those terrains. As part of his study, Northcott brilliantly reveals how the prevalent nature-culture divide in Western culture, including its notion of nature as "private property," has contributed to the global ecological crisis. While addressing real difficulties and global controversies surrounding climate change, Northcott presents substantial and persuasive fare in his Political Theology of Climate Change.

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

What is fashion? Where does it come from? Why has it come to permeate modern life? In the last half century, questions like these have drawn serious academic reflection, resulting in a new field of research--fashion studies--and generating a rich multidisciplinary discussion. Yet theology's voice has been conspicuously absent in this conversation. The time has finally come for theology to break her silence and join this decades-long conversation. Fashion Theology is the first of its kind: a serious and long-overdue account of the dynamic relationship between theology and fashion. Chronicling the epic journey from ancient Christian sources to current developments in fashion studies, cultural theologian Robert Covolo navigates the rich history of Christian thought as well as recent political, social, aesthetic, literary, and performance theory. Far from mere disparity or quick resolution, Covolo demonstrates that fashion and theology inhabit a mutual terrain that has, until recently, scarcely been imagined. Covolo retraces the way theologians have taken up fashion across history, unveiling how Christian thinkers have been fascinated with fashion well before the academy's current focus, and bringing these insights into the conversation with fashion itself: the logic by which fashion operates, how fashion shapes our world, and the way fashion imperceptibly molds our personal lives. Within fashion's realms reside some of life's greatest challenges: the foundations of political power, the basis for social order, the nature of aesthetics, how we inhabit time, and the means by which we tell stories about our lives--challenges, it turns out, that theologians also explore. Fashion favors the bold; theology demands humility. Holding the two together, Fashion Theology trailblazes an interdisciplinary path informed by a thoughtful engagement with the Christian witness. For those traversing this spectacle of unexpected crossroads and hotly contested terrain, the promise of fashion theology awaits with its myriad unexplored vistas. --Malcolm Barnard, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Loughborough University