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Political theology is widely discussed but little understood. Across the humanities and critical social sciences, even in popular discussion of current events, it has become a buzzword. Yet there is no consensus about its very definition.
This field-changing interdisciplinary book brings together three of the leading voices in political theology—a Christian theologian, a critical theorist, and an anthropologist—to offer new entry points to understand religion and politics. They explore similarities and differences in their approaches, guiding readers through scholarship in their own fields while also advancing a shared vision that speaks to crucial questions of justice in the contemporary world.
Rejecting the notion that political theology is a closed field with an established canon, the authors show it to be an open-ended, lively conversation that welcomes new participants. They demonstrate how voices and approaches from decolonial theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism, and ethnography, both in the Global North and in the Global South, are transforming the field.
This book addresses concerns about political theology’s ties to authoritarian and antidemocratic movements, demonstrating that an engaged political theology sheds critical light on volatile topics such as populism, racism, and ethnoreligious nationalism. At once accessible to students and groundbreaking for scholars, What Is Political Theology? provides a state-of-the-art global understanding.
What is Political Theology? is an important work which invites further reflection about the dangers, breadth, and richness of its own multiple origins. The authors have offered an engaging and challenging picture of future work in the field, opening wider the door for reflection concerning both the apophatic and cataphatic limits of political theology itself.
Three cutting-edge thinkers offer different approaches to political theology, summoned up from a wealth of wide-ranging and impressive research. They open up new horizons for the discipline, showing the breadth and complexity of political theology while breaking the grip of the European canon that goes all the way back to Carl Schmitt. What Is Political Theology? will attract the attention and earn the respect of readers across disciplines and generations.
— John D. Caputo, author of What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology
Political theology—or politics tethered to ultimate concern—is inescapable. The authors of this powerful and necessary book take this observation down fresh paths, proposing a series of approaches to political theology for a new generation. Recommended for anyone in search of new ways of conceiving of, and responding to, the drive to mastery that characterizes modern politics.
— Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States
In lucid and urgent prose, Bretherton, Lloyd, and Napolitano, each in their different ways, make a quietly groundbreaking case for doing political theology today. What Is Political Theology? is a rich resource, protean and inspiring, gathering energy from diverse fields and archives, a model of politically engaged interdisciplinary dialogue.
— Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law
At a time when the fractures in our common democratic life in the West are becoming ever more rancorous and divisive, we need a mode of political theology that offers us clarity without sacrificing depth, passion without jettisoning reason, and commitment without myopic partisanship. Written by three of the leading theorists in the field, What Is Political Theology? is a must read for our troubled times.
— Anthony G. Reddie, professor of Black theology, University of Oxford
Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. His books include Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (2019).
Vincent Lloyd is professor of theology and religious studies and director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. His books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (2022), and he is an editor of the journal Political Theology.
Valentina Napolitano is a professor and Connaught Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her books include Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (2016).
Introduction: Trajectories in Political Theology
1. Political Theology as Testimony, by Luke Bretherton
2. Political Theology from Below, by Vincent W. Lloyd
3. An Anthropological Political Theology, by Valentina Napolitano
4. Looking to the Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index