Books in the New Approaches to Religion and Power series

The ¿secular age¿ is not a smooth, untroubled process of accumulation and advance but an uneven and unpredictable series of clashes of interest. Charles Taylor¿s ¿immanent frame¿ cannot be construed merely as a phenomenon within religion and culture but urgently needs to be understood in political and economic terms¿i.e., as a class project. The failure of the secular, vividly displayed in the crumbling legitimacy of global institutions and in the spectacle of police violence, both calls for and makes possible a renewal of political agency. Tom James and David True argue that a theology of the cross has a distinctive potential today: it can pierce the sacred aura of normalcy around the consensual anti-politics of the neoliberal order so that a vision of a world beyond today¿s racialized capitalism can emerge. But they contend that we don¿t need to forsake the emancipatory aims of modernity nor retreat to local communities. As an alternative to these weak strategies, theyoffer a constructive and cruciform account of political agency that includes both prophetic resistance and practical wisdom, each embedded in contemporary struggles for freedom that, they argue, embody divine desire for a common world.

This book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of religious identities in the Global South.

Becca Whitla uses liberationist, postcolonial, and decolonial methods to analyze hymns, congregational singing, and song-leading practices.

This major work offers an historical description and systematic analysis of the root causes of this global economic crisis, which the authors understand as a crisis of western civilization, and provides a comprehensive solution based on theological social justice.

This book examines the operational dynamics of patriarchy that is deeply woven into the Indian cultural fabric and its persistence in spite of women advancing in Human Development Indices.

As stories of borders, territorial disputes, and migration have escalated in recent years, so too space has emerged as a critical concept in theoretical literature.

This text crafts a trinitarian theology that reorients theology from presumptions about the immateriality of the Trinity toward the places where the Trinity matters-material bodies in historical contexts and the intersecting ways political and theological power structures normalize and marginalize bodies on the basis of material difference.

Messianism Against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts and Empire is a work committed to re-thinking the Christian tradition from the point of view of messianic movements of eco-sustainability and social justice rather than magnified individuals.

In order to fight for a more just society, it is necessary to elaborate upon the theoretical reflections that critically analyze the faith and myths that support and legitimize the trajectory of contemporary capitalism and its utopia, as well as the faith and the complex relation that exists in between the notions of the subject and societies.

Interweaving feminist theological ideas, Asian spirituality, and the witnesses of World War II sex slaves, this book offers a new theology of body. It examines the multi-layered meaning of the broken body of Christ from Christological, sacramental, and ecclesiological perspectives, while exploring the centrality of body in theological discourse.

Drawing on decolonial perspective, this book provides a critical retrieval of Sergio Arce's theological thought, and proposes it as a source of inspiration to continue renewing liberation theologies in Cuba and in Latin America.

This book explores the themes of identity, suffering, and hope in the stories of Puerto Rican people to surface the anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology of a Puerto Rican decolonial theology.

This volume offers a detailed analysis of how the current phase of capitalism is eating away at social, interpersonal, and psychological health. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary body of research, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn describes an emerging form of human distress-what he calls `third order suffering'-that is rapidly becoming normative.

Nielsen offers a dialogue with Foucault, Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon and the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition, investigating the relation between social construction and freedom and proposing an historically friendly, ethically sensitive, and religico-philosophical model for human being and existence in a shared pluralistic world.

It argues that during the postcolonial and post-Holocaust era, Jewish thinkers in different parts of the world were influenced by Global South thought and mobilized this rich set of intellectual resources to confront the assimilation of normative Judaism by various incipient neo-colonial powers.

This book offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film which foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions and analyses three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala ; Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry ; and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There .

This volume addresses what happens to Christian theology when it follows its traditional habit of excluding religious others from the theological conversation. It argues that the exclusion of non-Christian voices blinds Christian theology not only to its own character, but also to the God to whom it seeks to be faithful.

What does it mean to theorize Christianity in light of the decolonial turn? This volume invites distinguished Latinx and Latin American scholars to a conversation that engages the rich theoretical contributions of the decolonial turn, while relocating Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, Latinx, and other often marginalized practices and hermeneutical perspectives to the center-stage of religious discourse in the Americas. Keeping in mind that all religions¿Christianity included¿are cultured, and avoiding the abstract references to Christianity common to the modern Eurocentric hegemonic project, the contributors favor embodied religious practices that emerge in concrete contexts and communities. Featuring essays from scholars such as Sylvia Marcos, Enrique Dussel, and Luis Rivera-Pagán, this volume represents a major step to bring Christian theology into the conversation with decolonial theory.

Drawing on cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen's threefold notion of decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold-war, this book provides analyses of the interrelated issues concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States' imperialist militarism in the Asia Pacific.

Drawing on cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen's threefold notion of decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold-war, this book provides analyses of the interrelated issues concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States' imperialist militarism in the Asia Pacific.

Rather than wield religion as a weapon or a ruse in irrational appeals, the book attempts to reimagine a shared American mythos and ethos, by reminding us of our shared stake in creating an America committed to the life of all peoples and species and to the full developments of our capabilities as an exercise of liberty.

This important collection of essays addresses the question of why scholars can no longer do without class in religious studies and theology, and what we can learn from a renewed engagement with the topic. This volume discusses what new discourses regarding notions of gender, ethnicity, and race might add to developments on notions of class.

Rather than wield religion as a weapon or a ruse in irrational appeals, the book attempts to reimagine a shared American mythos and ethos, by reminding us of our shared stake in creating an America committed to the life of all peoples and species and to the full developments of our capabilities as an exercise of liberty.

This important collection of essays addresses the question of why scholars can no longer do without class in religious studies and theology, and what we can learn from a renewed engagement with the topic. This volume discusses what new discourses regarding notions of gender, ethnicity, and race might add to developments on notions of class.