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Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor. In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology. Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions.” Thatamanil also notes troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and Trinity. This book proposes a new theology of religious diversity, one that opens the door to true interreligious learning.

Astrobiology forces us to realize how deeply tethered we are to this pale blue dot in the universe while also opening us to the exciting possibilities of existing in a fecund cosmos. Addressing both of these issues, this work offers a model for doing public theology attuned to astrobioloical humanities. It taps into theology’s capacity to develop societal goods by interpreting religious symbols as expressions of ultimacy that foster powerful moods for meaningfully ordering our ways of being-in and belonging-to the cosmos. Providing a series of specific examples drawn from astrobiology, doctrinal reflection on the imago Dei, and reflections on the Anthropocene, this book claims the Earth is not only a living planet but an artful one. Consequently, it suggests that the imago Dei be reframed in terms of planetarity: to be the imago Dei is to be a planetary system that opens up new possibilities for the flourishing of all creation by fostering technobiogeochemical cycles not subject to runaway, positive feedback. The imago Dei, then, is not something any one of us possesses; it is a symbol for what we live-into together as a species in intra-action with the wider habitable environment. Attentive to how this outlook can be fostered, the conclusion advocates for the development of presence, wonder, and play in the lives of individuals who seek to live as part of an artful planet.

Contrary to Catholicism, Catholic social teaching, and the commitment to live out the mercy of Jesus Christ, today’s dominant global economic and cultural system, neoliberalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. This book’s theological critique of neoliberalism begins with recent papal teaching against “economism,” proceeds into a historical and theoretical analysis of neoliberalism’s conception as a discourse in academia and the business community, its rise to global prominence through class warfare, its subtle redefining of human self-understanding via the notion of “human capital,” and its formation of an ethos of mercilessness. Central is treatment of four neoliberal-perpetuated and -exacerbated crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. This entails plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism. The book offers an antineoliberal systematic theology founded on Trinitarian mercy, a neighbor anthropology and innkeeper ecclesiology, and a politics of mercy, or a civilizational program grounded in, yet reimagining, the traditional Catholic works of mercy. This coheres with a “playbook” for social transformation that uses the universal destination of goods and abolitionism to direct the corporal works of mercy against the neoliberal utopianism that brought enhanced ecological devastation, slum growth, mass imprisonment, and abuse of migrants. In concert with official Catholic teaching, the Gospel injunction to “be merciful,” and hopeful visions of various people of good will, Send Lazarus urges a robust antineoliberal and antiracist politics, which amounts to a joyous expression of Christic hope for abundant life.

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.