Books in the Dispatches series

Dispatches on nationalism and religionAs an insider to church politics and a scholar of contemporary Orthodoxy, Cyril Hovorun outlines forms of political orthodoxy in Orthodox churches, past and present.Hovorun draws a big picture of religion being politicized and even weaponized. While Political Orthodoxies assesses phenomena such as nationalism and anti-Semitism, both widely associated with Eastern Christianity, Hovorun focuses on the theological underpinnings of the culture wars waged in eastern and southern Europe. The issues in these wars include monarchy and democracy, Orientalism and Occidentalism, canonical territory, and autocephaly. Wrought with peril, Orthodox culture wars have proven to turn toward bloody conflict, such as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.Accordingly, this book explains the aggressive behavior of Russia toward its neighbors and the West from a religious standpoint. The spiritual revival of Orthodoxy after the collapse of Communism made the Orthodox church in Russia, among other things, an influential political protagonist, which in some cases goes ahead of the Kremlin. Following his identification and analysis, Hovorun suggests ways to bring political Orthodoxy back to the apostolic and patristic track.

Biblical studies and the teaching of biblical studies are clearly changing, though it is less clear what the changes mean and how we should evaluate them. In this book, Susanne Scholz engages some of the issues as she has encountered them in the field over the last twenty years. She casts a feminist, class-critical eye on the politics of pedagogy, in higher education and in wider society alike, decrypting important developments in "the architecture of educational power." She also examines how the increasingly intercultural, interreligious, and diasporic dynamics in society inform the hermeneutical and methodological possibilities for biblical exegesis, whether the topic is rape in ancient Near Eastern legislation or Eve and Adam in the American Christian right's approaches. In bold strokes, Scholz lays out a program for biblical scholarship and pedagogy that connects to current events and ideas, such as the Title IX debate, inclusive language, or film. Taken as a whole, the fourteen chapters demonstrate that the foregrounding of gender, placed into its intersectional contexts, offers intriguing and valuable alternative ways of seeing the world and the Bible's place in it.

Theology and the Globalized Present focuses on the world's future in God and God's creativeness. In response to a globalized economy that reconfigures time to the detriment of human flourishing, McDowell presents a re-imagined theological vision of eschatological memory and Eucharistic performance. This entails not so much a dreaming of a different world as a dreaming of this world differently. The theological materials offer a temporality that is hope-generating, critically attentive to the inequitable character of features of our world, and educative of ethical wisdom in a self-regulating and emancipatory witness of remembering and anticipating the transformative presence of God.

How is comedy relevant to the global crises of late modernity and the theological critiques that respond to them? For an earlier generation of theologians, whose experiences were shaped by war, tragedy was the literary paradigm for ethical and theological understanding. By contrast, this work draws upon recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytic studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy, Marcus Pound argues that comedy is a participation in the divine. As such, it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life, especially if theology is to respond to postmodern capitalism's ideological imperative to "have fun." --

Fourteen leading metamodern writers create and inspire viable and desirable futures in this time between worlds, where one pattern of collective life is dying and another needs our help to be born.