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The central Christian belief in salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains one of the most intractable mysteries of Christian faith. In Atonement and Comparative Theology, Christian theologians with expertise in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and African religions reflect on how engagement with these traditions sheds new light on the Christian understanding of atonement by pointing to analogous structures of sin and salvation, drawing new attention to the scandal of the cross, and offering fresh insight into the meaning of redemption. Together, they illustrate the many ways in which comparative theology may deepen and enrich Christian theological reflection upon the salvific meaning of the cross.

Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and just, all contribute to an atmosphere thirsty for humanistic economic analysis. This volume offers such analysis from a novel and generative diversity of vantage points, including religious and secular histories, theological ethics, and business management. In particular, Working Alternatives brings modern Roman Catholic forms of engaging with economic questions—embodied in the evolving set of documents that make up the area of “Catholic social thought”—into conversation with one another and with non-Catholic experiments in economic thought and practice. Clustered not by discipline but by their emphasis on either 1) new ways of seeing economic practice 2) new ways of valuing human activity, or 3) implementation of new ways of working, the volume’s essays facilitate the necessarily interdisciplinary thinking demanded by the complexities of economic sustainability and justice. Collectively, the works gathered here assert and test a challenging and far-reaching hypothesis: economic theories, systems, and practices—ways of conceiving, organizing and enacting work, management, supply, production, exchange, remuneration, wealth, and consumption—rely on basic, often unexamined, presumptions about human personhood, relations, and flourishing.

Within the humanities, specifically in the past decade, trauma theory has become a robust site of interdisciplinary work. Trauma resonates with scholars in and across disciplines and has become a trope with a distinctive significance. The scope of scholarship on trauma has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma. This volume gathers scholars in a variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma in light of its burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. From distinctive disciplinary vectors, the work of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians consider the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence. By bringing together scholars at the intersections of trauma, social theory, and especially the continental philosophy of religion, this volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s transcendent, evental, or unassimilable quality is being wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it is promulgated as a form of obscurantism.

Inner Animalities analyses the human-animal distinction as a discursive theme running ubiquitously through Christian theological anthropology. Arguing that historically pervasive disavowals of human animality create ineradicable contradictions within accounts of human life and also install an anti-ecological impulse at the heart of Christian theology, this project constructively imagines a theological anthropology centered upon human commonality with fellow creatures. This constructive work perceives divine grace at work in human instincts, desires, and enmeshment in quotidian relations (rather than in rationality, language, and transcendence). The broadest arc of the book’s argument is that only a thickly articulated self-understanding rooted in creaturely commonality can provide an adequate basis for responding to ongoing ecological degradation. The conjunction of Critical Animal Studies with constructive theology in this study, then, aims to generate a new approach to ecological theology. The book’s analysis places ancient Christians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus along with contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg in critical conversation with theorists of human-animal relations from Jacques Derrida and Kelly Oliver to Valerie Plumwood and Giorgio Agamben.

Denying existence to certain others, while still tolerating diversity, stabilizes a political order in a society; or does it? Addressing this classical question of political thought, Other Others intervenes both to the study of the Talmud and Jewish Thought in its aftermath, and to political theory in general. Braking through the horizon of the currently predominant approaches to the concept of the political in political ontology and political theology, the book turns to the Talmud. In light and despite these theories, the pages of the Talmud provide a (dis)appearing display of the interpersonal rather than intersubjective political, which entails a radically different take on what engaging others means in society. The book shows how philosophy- and theology-driven approaches to the concept of the political have tacitly elided a concept of the interpersonal political, which the Talmud exemplifies. Both addressing and resisting such an elision, the book rereads the Talmud, while at the same time and by the same move reconsidering contemporary political theory. At the center of the analysis are figures of excluded others – of the “other others” who programmatically do not claim any “original” belonging to a territory and therefore by the logic of the currently predominant schools of political thought are questionable in their right to exist. The Political moves from a modern political figure of “Jews” as such “other others” to the Talmud, arriving, at the end, to a demand to think earth anew, now beyond the notions of territory, land, nationalism, internationalism, or even beyond the scope of a territorialized universe.

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy—Levinas’s ethics of the Other and Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life “without a why.” Rather than aligning immanence with the enclosures of the subject, The Self-Emptying Subject engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates and subjects life in secular no less than in religious domains, this book challenges the dominant distribution of concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse, which insists on associating transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. This book argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G.W.F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative re-writing of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical archives (Bataille).

In France today, philosophy—in particular phenomenology—finds itself in a paradoxical relation to theology. Some debate a “theological turn.” Others disavow theological arguments as if it would tarnish their philosophical integrity, while carrying out theology in other venues. But no one deliberately attempts to cross this divide by taking responsibility in his own thought for each discipline in its own right. In braving “the crossing of the Rubicon,” Falque seeks to end this face-off. Convinced that “the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes,” he proposes a counterblow by theology against phenomenology. Instead of another philosophy of “the threshold” or of “the leap,” he argues that an encounter between the two disciplines, insofar as each is fully assumed, will reveal their mutual fruitfulness and, at the same time, their true distinctive borders. In this book, he looks back and forward at his own work in the borderlands of philosophy and theology. He seeks to provide an account for his method in moving, for example, between Levinas, Ricoeur, and the Catholic Eucharist in generating his Catholic hermeneutic of the body and voice, or between Bultmann, Merleau-Ponty, and Aquinas in terms of a reflection on the activity of believing. Falque shows thus that he has made the crossing: alea iacta est, “the die is cast” with audacity and perhaps a little recklessness, but knowing full well that no one thinks without exposing themself to risk.

A leading Italian feminist philosopher and the Archbishop of Milan face off over the contemporary meaning of the biblical commandment not to kill. The result is a series of erudite and wide-ranging arguments that move from murder and suicide to just war and drone strikes, from bioethics and biopolitics to hermeneutics and philology, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, from Torah and Scripture to art and literature, from the essence of human dignity and the paradoxes of fratricide to the finer points of Lévinasian ethics. Less a direct debate than a disputation in the classical sense, Thou Shall Not Kill proves to be a searching meditation on one of the unstated moral premises shared by otherwise bitterly opposed political factions. It will stimulate the mind of the novice while also reminding more advanced readers of the necessity and desirability of thinking in the present.

Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

The question of religion was a major preoccupation for Jacques Derrida especially during the last years of his life. His writings on this theme have continued to inspire and provoke, and they have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion provides a compact introduction to this debate, bringing together contributions by some of the best-known voices in the field, as well as work by younger scholars. It considers Derrida’s fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity; it broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition; and it examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam. The volume concludes with a debate between John Caputo and Martin Hägglund about the meaning of Derrida's use of religious themes and concepts, and poses the question of whether deconstruction can be valuable resource for religious philosophy or whether it is radically atheistic. The discussion gets to the heart of controversies about deconstruction—its ethical implications and its political ambitions. It shows how religious ideas were both adopted and re-worked by Derrida in ways that had a profound impact on both his own intellectual development and on the history of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.