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Winner of the 2014 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of fetishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion. While the book is the conclusion to the five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth, it also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time.
In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of fetishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion. While the book is the conclusion to the five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth, it also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time.
Price: $215.00
Pages: 378
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publication Date:
17 October 2013
ISBN: 9789004252325
Format: Hardcover
Winner of the 2014 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
"The volume contains three truly excellent chapters [...]" – Marcus Hunt, in: Marx & Philosophy, 4 March 2014
"A great philosopher once wrote that 'some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested'. The five volumes of Roland Boer's magisterial series Marxism and Theology may well be all three." – Matthew Sharpe, in: Arena Journal 41/42 (2013), [28]-58
"The volume contains three truly excellent chapters [...]" – Marcus Hunt, in: Marx & Philosophy, 4 March 2014
"A great philosopher once wrote that 'some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested'. The five volumes of Roland Boer's magisterial series Marxism and Theology may well be all three." – Matthew Sharpe, in: Arena Journal 41/42 (2013), [28]-58
Roland Boer researches at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and teaches at Renmin University of China, Beijing. He has published extensively on Marxism, theology, political theory and biblical criticism. His most recent works are Lenin, Religion, and Theology (Palgrave 2013), Marxist Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Bloomsbury, 2014) and, with Christina Petterson, Idols of Nations: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism (Westminster John Knox, 2014).