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Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, and Kearney's God who may be. This book attempts to represent some of the most considered responses to Richard Kearney's recent writings on the philosophy of religion, in particular The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. It brings together seventeen essays that share the common problematic of the otherness of the Other — seventeen different variations on the same theme: philosophy about God after God — that is to say, a way of thinking God otherwise than ontologically.

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.

How do Catholic intellectuals draw on faith in their work? And how does their work as scholars influence their lives as people of faith? In this book, ten leading figures explore the connections in their own lives between the private realms of faith and their public calling as teachers, scholars, and intellectuals. This last decade of Marianist Lectures brings together theologians and philosophers, historians, anthropologists, academic scholars, and lay intellectuals and critics. Here are Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., on the tensions between faith and theology in his career; Jill Ker Conway on the spiritual dimensions of memory and personal narrative; Mary Ann Glendon on the roots of human rights in Catholic social teaching; Mary Douglas on the fruitful dialogue between religion and anthropology in her own life; Peter Steinfels on what it really means to be a "liberal Catholic"; and Margaret O'Brien Steinfels on the complicated history of women in today's church. From Charles Taylor and David Tracy on the fractured relationship between Catholicism and modernity to Gustavo Gutierrez on the enduring call of the poor and Marcia Colish on the historic links between the church and intellectual freedom, these essays track a decade of provocative, illuminating, and essential thought.

Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings together essays that interrogate the problem of modern/colonial definitions of the human person and that take up the struggle to decolonize these descriptive statements. As the problem of coloniality transcends disciplinary constructions, so do the contributions in this book. They engage work from various fields, including ethnic studies, religious studies, theology, queer theory, philosophy, and literary studies. The essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man were catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person. Wynter asks this question within a larger project of unsettling and countering these definitions. Contributors to this collection follow in this move—sometimes in direct reference to Wynter’s work and sometimes primarily focusing on the work of others—of asking how Western modernity has naturalized itself through a discourse on the human. This analytical work taken up by contributors is at the service of unsettling and countering this naturalization.

This book explores a new religious ideal within African American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid culturally coded racist rhetoric and practices, it constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in existing hagiographic and iconic African American writings. The first part of the book argues for a concept of sacred humanity that is supported by the best available knowledge emerging from science studies, philosophy of religion, and the tenets of religious naturalism. With this concept, the book features capacious views of humans as dynamic, evolving, social organisms having the capacity to transform ourselves and create nobler worlds where all sentient creatures flourish, and as aspiring lovers of life and of each other. Within the context of African American history and culture, the sacred humanity concept also offers new ways of grasping an ongoing theme of traditional African American religiosity: the necessity of establishing and valuing blacks’ full humanity. In the second part, the book traces indications of the sacred humanity concept within select works of three major African American intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. The theoretical linkage of select ideas and themes in their writings with the concept of sacred humanity marks the emergence of an African American religious naturalism.

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.

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.

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.

In the face of globalized ecological and economic crises, how do religion, the postsecular, and political theology reconfigure political theory and practice? As the planet warms and the chasm widens between the 1 percent and the global 99, what thinking may yet energize new alliances between religious and irreligious constituencies? This book brings together political theorists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion to open discursive and material spaces in which to shape a vibrant planetary commons. Attentive to the universalizing tendencies of “the common,” the contributors seek to reappropriate the term in response to the corporate logic that asserts itself as a universal solvent. In the resulting conversation, the common returns as an interlinked manifold, under the ethos of its multitudes and the ecology of its multiplicity. Beginning from what William Connolly calls the palpable “fragility of things,” Common Goods assembles a transdisciplinary political theology of the Earth. With a nuance missing from both atheist and orthodox religious approaches, the contributors engage in a multivocal conversation about sovereignty, capital, ecology, and civil society. The result is an unprecedented thematic assemblage of cosmopolitics and religious diversity; of utopian space and the time of insurrection; of Christian socialism, radical democracy, and disability theory; of quantum entanglement and planetarity; of theology fleshly and political.

In recent decades, comparative theology has emerged as a method of thinking as an adherent to a particular religious tradition, through deep and focused conversation with another tradition. This discipline has the potential to enrich Christian systematic theology and, by extension, theological education, at its foundations. For this purpose, Comparing Faithfully: Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection reconsiders five central areas of Christian doctrinal reflection in light of focused interreligious readings, as a resource for pastors and theology students. The dialogical format of the book creates conversations about the doctrine of God, theodicy, humanity, Christology, and soteriology. The comparative essays span examples from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Jain, and Confucian traditions, Aztec theology, and contemporary “spiritual but not religious” thought, to offer exciting new perspectives on Christian doctrine.

This book asks, on behalf of individuals with profound intellectual disabilities, what it means to be human. That question has traditionally been answered with an emphasis on an intellectual capacity—the ability to employ concepts or to make moral choices—and has ignored the value of individuals who lack such intellectual capacities. The book suggests, rather, that human beings be understood in terms of participation in relationships of mutual responsiveness, which includes but is not limited to intellectual forms of communicating. The book supports its argument by developing a phenomenology of how an individual with a profound intellectual disability relates, drawn from clinical experience as a physical therapist. The book thereby demonstrates that these individuals participate in relationships of mutual responsiveness, though in nonsymbolic, bodily ways. To be human, to image God, it argues, is to respond to the world around us in any number of ways, bodily or symbolically. Such an understanding does not exclude people with intellectual disabilities but rather includes them among those who participate in the image of God.

This book brings together process and postmodern theologians to reflect on the crucial topic of energy, asking: What are some of the connections between energy and theology? How do ideas about humanity and divinity interrelate with how we live our lives? Its chapters address energy in at least three distinct ways. First, in terms of physics, the discovery of dark energy in 1998 uncovered a mysterious force that seems to be driving the expansion of the universe. Here cosmology converges with theological reflection about the nature and origin of the universe. Second, the social and ecological contexts of energy use and the current energy crisis have theological implications insofar as they are caught up with ultimate human meanings and values. Finally, in more traditional theological terms of divine spiritual energy, we can ask how human conceptions of energy relate to divine energy in terms of creative power. The book sketches out a fresh eco-theology of energy, and proposes new ways to think about the relationship between science and religion.

This book is the first systematic discussion of the bodhisattva path in Māhayāna Buddhism from the perspective of Christian comparative theology. With the increasing interest and participation of Christians in Buddhist practice, many are seeking a deeper exploration of this topic, and of the way the two traditions and their teachings might interface. Crucified Wisdom provides important scholarly background material for this discussion, as well as a constructive proposal for Christian engagement. The text combines a rich exposition of the bodhisattva path with detailed reflection on it in connection with specific Christian convictions. The description of bodhisattva teachings centers on Śāntideva’s classic work the Bodicaryāvatāra and its interpretation by Tibetan commentators. The book argues that Christian theology can take direct instruction from Buddhism in three respects: developing an understanding of a “no-self” dimension in all creatures, recognizing an unvarying nondual dimension of divine immanence in the world, and appreciating that both of these are constituent dimensions in Christ’s incarnation and human redemption. The writer argues that Christians rightly remain committed to the value of novelty in history, the enduring significance of human persons, and the Trinitarian reality of God. A notable feature of the book is its exploration of the tensions around the crucifixion of Jesus in Buddhist-Christian interpretation. This work will be of particular value for those interested in “dual belonging” in connection to these traditions.

This book probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in the Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. To this end, it rethinks the mystical figure of the abyss in philosophical and theological literature by rethinking its meaning from a wider, socio-political perspective. Theologically, the abyss denotes the blurring of boundaries between creaturely finitude and divine potency as reflected in the writings of certain Neoplatonic and medieval mystics. The book carves the channel of a constructive conversation by examining the ethico-political meaning of the abyss as the book locates its trace within the trajectory of continental philosophy by way of Schelling and Hegel. With the end of exploring an emergent socio-political meaning of the abyss beyond the Eurocentric vision, it further extends the conversation to the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers who employ the trope of the abyss in order to articulate the historical/political trauma. By reading the abyss as an all-pervading ontological groundlessness of being that involves an insurmountable material and political devastation, this book re-invents a new idiom for articulating the ethico-political possibility that the mystical thought opens up for the historically marginalized communities.

This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.

This anthology gathers the work of three generations of Latina/o theologians and philosopher who have taken up the task of transforming their respective disciplines from the standpoint of liberation and what has been called the “decolonial turn” in social theory, theology, and philosophy. This collection is focuses on the different ways in which Latina/o thinkers, activists, and public intellectuals are producing knowledge that addresses the unique social location of Latinas/os in the US. Instead of continuing to be represented, this group of scholars show the unsuspecting and original ways in which Latina/o locations in the US can be generative places for the development of new matrixes of knowledge. The book, thus, articulates a new point of departure for the self-understanding of not simply Latina/os, but also US citizens in this new age of post-colonialism and globalization.

A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with these questions. It attempts to triangulate philosophical and theoretical reflections on animality and humanity with theological reflections on divinity. If the animal–human distinction is being rethought and retheorized as never before, then the animal–human–divine distinctions need to be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized along with it. This is the task that the multidisciplinary team of theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, and historians assembled in this volume collectively undertakes. They do so frequently with recourse to Derrida's animal philosophy and also with recourse to an eclectic range of other relevant thinkers, such as Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gloria Anzaldua, Helene Cixous, A. N. Whitehead, and Lynn White Jr. The result is a volume that will be essential reading for religious studies audiences interested in ecological issues, animality studies, and posthumanism, as well as for animality studies audiences interested in how constructions of the divine have informed constructions of the nonhuman animal through history.

This book makes the case for a God of enjoyment who passionately suffers and yearns because of love, and permeably intermingles with the cosmos, loving intensely, and becoming like a divine silhouette of so “good a lover” that grotesquely incarnates the many, even if appearing improper. The thematic development invites the reader to journey through paths of excess of the intemperate kind initially drawn from the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas on the ecstatic love of God, and encountered in the erotic poetry of mystics like St. Teresa de Avila, whose delectable arrows provide an opening for passage and divine transfiguration of God in the manifold shapes of the cosmos. Comfortably locating itself in postmodern and process theological and philosophical discourse, and culminating with hospitable images of banqueting, fiesta, and the carnival, drawn mainly from the work of assorted Spanish and Latin American thinkers, the book progressively grants a flesh of pain mixed with joy to God’s affect.

This book poses critical questions and suggests constructive possibilities regarding the extent to which trinitarian and pluralist discourses can be put into fruitful conversation with one another. On the one hand, the book interrogates the possibilities of trinitarian theology and its ethical promise with regard to divine and creaturely relationality by putting it into specific engagement with discourses of pluralism, diversity, and multiplicity. It asks how trinitarian conceptions of divine multiplicity might open the Christian tradition to increasingly more creative and affirming visions of creaturely identities, difference, and relationality—including the specific difference of religious plurality. Alternatively, where can the triadic patterning evident in the Christian theological tradition be seen to have always exceeded the boundaries of Christian thought and experience, inhabiting and determining other religious traditions' conceptions of divine and/or creaturely reality in ways internal to their own distinctive histories? On the other hand, the book interrogates the possibilities of various discourses on pluralism by putting them in a very particular and concrete pluralist context. Religious pluralists, comparative theologians, and scholars of religious studies are place alongside and put into conversation with theological and doctrinal work carried out within the (albeit broadly conceived) normative thread of the Christian trinitarian tradition. To what extent can pluralist discourse collect within itself a convergent diversity of orthodox, heterodox, postcolonial, process, poststructuralist, liberationist, and feminist sensibilities while avoiding irruptions of conflict, competition, or the logic of mutual exclusion?

We hope—even as we doubt—that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species' self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing—but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity. This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. This book probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism's questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these chapters explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting.