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Anarchy and the Kingdom of God presents the reader with a unique critique of both traditional and contemporary political theologies that have rationalized and justified power structures and oppression of various kinds. The book advances an “anarchist” theological approach to the socio-political sphere, which is based on some of the basic presuppositions of Orthodox Christian anthropology and metaphysics. Developing a coherent critique of power structures and oppression, as one of the most prominent forces in human history, Davor Džalto advances human freedom as a foundational theological principle. Building on insights and arguments ranging from New Testament texts and Church Fathers, to modern religious and political thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Ellul, and Sheldon Wolin, Džalto contextualizes the political realm as primarily the realm of power, which is rooted in a specific logic of being. This logic, based on self-affirmation and the power dynamics of domination/submission, is confronted here with a different (eschatological) mode of existence based on freedom and love. Developing an “anarchist” political theology, the book offers a method for dealing with a variety of contemporary social and political issues. With a genuine theological approach to the issues of human freedom and power dynamics, the book enables a fresh re-examination of the problem of democracy and justice in the age of global (neoliberal) capitalism.

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.

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.

A range of contemporary theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States shares a conviction that the central task of theology is to respond, resist, or reshape consumer culture. And in many of these narratives, the location par excellence of that response is the Eucharist. Christian hope, they argue, is found in our effective cultivation of practices of everyday resistance to the market. This book argues that reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support that resistance undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture, binds grace to human activity, and instrumentalizes the Eucharist into ethics. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in, and in spite of, consumer culture, it proposes a mode of theological reflection on consumer culture and Eucharist that sees their interrelationship in light of the unique challenges that American consumerism poses to Christian thought and practice. With an angle of vision shaped by Michel de Certeau’s insight into the tactics of everyday life and Walter Benjamin’s way of seeing “theological” wishes and desires invested in fallen commodities, it offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes. And it proposes a vision of the Eucharist that takes seriously its this-worldly materiality even as it makes promises this world cannot keep.

The material turn in the humanities (and social sciences) entails rejections along with its embrace of positive ideas about matter. It has largely rejected theology, though scholars of religion have begun to change this; and it rejects anthropocentrism, particularly the idea that humans are uniquely capable of knowledge and action. This book takes up three apparently anthropocentric myths that are central to Abrahamic religions—those of the primal human, the incarnated figure of a redeemer, and the resurrected body. At first glance, the existence of these stories seems to reinforce a very human-centered theology. Many ancient and medieval readings of each of these mythic figures, though, particularly within the versions of the religious traditions that emphasize Wisdom, offer possibilities for readings that expand knowing, agency, and even divinity into all of the matter of the world. These mythic readings of matter, beginning with but not restricted to human bodies, supplement our factual, scientific readings of the material world to engage wider kinds of knowing and affective attention.

In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary Father Javier Saeta was not a tragedy, but a triumph. He optimistically reassured Kino, “It is a good sign, Father, that all those missions begin with the blood of a minister to cultivate it since it is an indication of their perseverance and good stability.” While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand suffering, violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. When positioning themselves vis-à-vis rival religious orders, petitioning superiors for support, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and Indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that winning would come through their wounding and victories through victimization. This book correlates these tales of suffering to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how such traditions and practices worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, it focuses on an agricultural metaphor that pervaded missionary discourse where Jesuits understood their lives and labors as seed, watered by the sweat of their suffering, tears of their exile, and blood of their sacrifice.

This volume develops new resources around the topic of political theology. The discourse of political theology is here situated on an edge, that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared world. The tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt, along with critical attempts to disengage religion from his right-wing politics. The contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race and Black Lives Matter, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. This book includes world-renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

This collection, marking the centenary of Avery Dulles's birth, makes an entirely distinctive contribution to contemporary theological discourse as we approach the second century of the cardinal's influence, and the twenty-first of Christian witness in the world. Moving beyond a festschrift, the volume offers both historical analyses of Dulles's contributions and applications of his insights and methodologies to current issues like immigration, exclusion, and digital culture. It includes chapters by Dulles's students, colleagues, and peers, as well as by emerging scholars who have been and continue to be indebted to his theological vision and encyclopedic fluency in the ecclesiological developments of the post-conciliar Church. Though focused more on Catholic and ecumenical affairs than interreligious ones, the volume is intentionally outward facing and strives to make clear the diverse and pluralistic contours of the cardinal's nearly unrivaled impact on the North American Church, which truly crossed ideological, denominational, and generational boundaries. While critically recognizing the limits and lacunae of his historical moment, it serves as one among a multitude of testaments to the notion that the ripples of Avery Dulles's influence continue to widen toward intellectually distant shores.

This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. The contributions in the volume critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for previously ignored themes, perspectives, knowledges, and experiences of women in Orthodox Christian contexts. The volume pushes out the understanding of Orthodox Christianity in new directions by looking at Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes—and by offering new theoretical insights. The volume combines the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth. Employing various research approaches and methodologies, the contributions engage two major intertwined lines of analysis—continuity and transformation—in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. To be sure, continuity contains the seeds of change, and transformation emerges within seemingly rigid structures and practices, in defiance to claims—coming both from within and without Orthodox Christianity—that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time.