CiteULike: heraclitus's theology

The Economy of Grace

Kathryn Tanner — 2008-06-02T01:19:20-00:00

(02 September 2005)

Are there any fair and viable alternatives to global capitalism? University of Chicago theologian Kathryn Tanner offers here a serious and creative proposal for evaluating economic theory and behavior through a theological lens.

Theology, Language and Culture: The Word Made Strange: The World Made Strange

John Milbank — 2008-06-02T01:02:22-00:00

(15 December 1996)

The essays in this new book from John Milbank range over the entire field of theology, and both extend and enrich the theological perspective underlying his earlier _Theology and Social Theory._ The essays are focused around the theme of a theological approach to language, and offer a richly textured and broad ranging inquiry which will contribute to a variety of contemporary debates.

Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy Series)

John Milbank — 2008-06-02T01:02:11-00:00

(13 February 2003)

_Being Reconciled_ is a radical and entirely fresh theological treatment of the classic theory of the Gift in the context of divine reconciliation. It reconsiders notions of freedom and exchange in relation to a Christian doctrine which understands Creation, grace and incarnation as heavenly gifts, but the Fall, evil and violence as refusal of those gifts. In a sustained and rigorous response to the works of Derrida, Levinas, Marion, Zizek, Hauerwas and the 'Radical Evil' school, John Milbank posits the daring view that only transmission of the forgiveness offered by the Divine Humanity makes reconciliation possible on earth. Any philosophical understanding of forgiveness and redemption therefore requires theological completion. Both a critique of post-Kantian modernity, and a new theology that engages with issues of language, culture, time, politics and historicity, Being Reconciled insists on the dependency of all human production and understanding on a God who is infinite in both utterance and capacity. Intended as the first in a trilogy of books centered on the gift, it is an original and vivid new application of a classic theory by a leading international theologian.

Theopolitical Imagination

Williams Cavanaugh — 2008-06-02T01:01:46-00:00

(20 March 2003)

Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

William Cavanaugh — 2007-03-22T11:56:10-00:00

(01 November 1998)

In this engrossing analysis, Cavanaugh contends that the Eucharist is the Church's response to the use of torture as a social discipline. The author develops a theology of the political which presents torture as one instance of a larger confrontation of powers over bodies, both individual and social. He argues that a Christian practice of the political is embodied in Jesus' own torture at the hands of the powers of this world. The analysis of torture therefore is situated within wider discussions in the fields of ecclesiology and the state, social ethics and human rights, and sacramental theology.The book focuses on the experience of Chile and the Catholic Church there, before and during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, 1973-1990. Cavanaugh has first-hand experience of working with the Church in Chile, and his interviews with ecclesiastical officials and grassroots Church workers speak directly to the reader. The book uses this example to examine the theoretical bases of twentieth-century "social catholicism" and its inability to resist the disciplines of the state, in contrast to a truer Christian practice of the political in the Eucharist.The book as a whole ties eucharistic theology to concrete eucharistic practice, showing that the Eucharist is not a "symbol" but a real cathartic summary of the practices by which God forms people into the Body of Christ, producing a sense of communion stronger than that of any nation state.

Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

William Cavanaugh — 2008-06-02T00:58:12-00:00

(01 May 2008)

Should Christians be for or against the free market? For or against globalization? How are we to live in a world of scarcity? William Cavanaugh uses Christian resources to incisively address basic economic matters -- the free market, consumer culture, globalization, and scarcity -- arguing that we should not just accept these as givens but should instead change the terms of the debate. Among other things, Cavanaugh discusses how God, in the Eucharist, forms us to consume and be consumed rightly. Examining pathologies of desire in contemporary "free market" economies, Being Consumed puts forth a positive and inspiring vision of how the body of Christ can engage in economic alternatives. At every turn, Cavanaugh illustrates his theological analysis with concrete examples of Christian economic practices.

Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to Their Reconciliation

Andrew Collier — 2008-06-02T00:48:34-00:00

(24 May 2001)

Christians and Marxists have co-operated in various forms of political work in recent decades, and, after earlier years of antagonism, thinkers on both sides have come to take the other seriously. The aim of this book is to get Christianity and Marxism to meet on terrain on which they might seem most opposed: their philosophical positions; and to do so without watering either down, but taking then full strength.

The Peaceable Kingdom

Stanley Hauerwas — 2007-03-21T14:41:41-00:00

(01 October 2003)

Community, Liberalism and Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics)

David Fergusson — 2007-03-21T14:44:23-00:00

(27 January 2005)

The Hauerwas Reader

Stanley Hauerwas — 2007-03-21T14:42:45-00:00

(01 August 2001)

Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most widely read and oft-cited theologians writing today. A prolific lecturer and author, he has been at the forefront of key developments in contemporary theology, ranging from narrative theology to the “recovery of virtue.” Yet despite his prominence and the esteem reserved for his thought, his work has never before been collected in a single volume that provides a sense of the totality of his vision. The editors of The Hauerwas Reader, therefore, have compiled and edited a volume that represents all the different periods and phases of Hauerwas’s work. Highlighting both his constructive goals and penchant for polemic, the collection reflects the enormous variety of subjects he has engaged, the different genres in which he has written, and the diverse audiences he has addressed. It offers Hauerwas on ethics, virtue, medicine, and suffering; on euthanasia, abortion, and sexuality; and on war in relation to Catholic and Protestant thought. His essays on the role of religion in liberal democracies, the place of the family in capitalist societies, the inseparability of Christianity and Judaism, and on many other topics are included as well. Perhaps more than any other author writing on religious topics today, Hauerwas speaks across lines of religious traditions, appealing to Methodists, Jews, Anabaptists or Mennonites, Catholics, Episcopalians, and others.

How Just Is the Market Economy?

Edward Dommen — 2008-06-01T12:58:05-00:00

(01 December 2003)

Is the Market Moral?: A Dialogue on Religion, Economics and Justice (Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion & Public Life)

Rebecca Blank — 2008-06-01T12:57:33-00:00

(01 July 2003)

In the great tradition of moral argument about the nature of the economic market, Rebecca Blank and William McGurn join to debate the fundamental questions—equality and efficiency, productivity and social justice, individual achievement and personal rights in the workplace, the costs and benefits of corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism. And they do so grounded in both economic sophistication and religious commitment. Rebecca Blank is an economist by training and describes herself as "culturally Protestant in the habits of mind and heart." She has also chaired the committee that wrote the statement on Christian faith and economic life adopted by the United Church of Christ. Addressing market failure, for her, requires that sometimes "freedom to choose" give way to other human values. William McGurn, a journalist and a Roman Catholic, uses his expertise in economics to reflect on the teachings of the church concerning the morality of the market. For McGurn, humans reach their fullest potential when they are free from the constraints of others. He writes that "our quarrel is not so much with Adam Smith or Milton Friedman but with the Providence that so clearly designed man to be his most prosperous at his most free." This book grapples with the new imperatives of a global economy while working in the classic tradition of political economy which always treated seriously the questions of morality, justice, productivity, and freedom.

Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics

Robert Nelson — 2008-06-01T10:22:21-00:00

(01 July 1993)

...this is the most profound book on the boundary of theology and economics in the past couple of decades. It has a depth of perspective, a scope of scholarship and a discernment that is rare in this field.-CHRISTIAN CENTURY

Theology and Economics?: Values, Protests, Virtues (Radical Orthodoxy)

Long — 2008-05-31T15:38:01-00:00

(30 March 2000)

_Divine Economy_ is the first book to directly address the need for a closer relationship between the two areas. Theology and economics have been treated as very separate and isolated disciplines. Long seeks to answer the question, what has theology to do with economics? He explains that both theology and economics are sciences of human action. This book calls for an active dialogue between theology and economics that calls for a functional economy which doesn't subordinate theological knowledge.

Calculated Futures: Theology, Ethics and Economics

Long — 2008-05-31T15:37:46-00:00

Calculated Futures examines the ethical and theological underpinnings of the free-market economy, investigating not only the morality of corporations and exchange rates, but also how the politics of economics shape people as moral agents. It does this less by insisting on the unfavorable effects of capitalism, and more by drawing on theological virtues, Christian doctrines, and liturgical practices to discover what they might show us about economic exchanges. Calculated Futures seeks a way forward by engaging economics as a social scientific discipline without subordinating theology to it.

Alienation and Economics

Walter Weisskopf — 2008-05-31T15:20:17-00:00

Political Metaphysics: God in Global Capitalism (the Slave, the Masters, Lacan, and the Surplus)

Kiarina Kordela — 2008-05-15T14:43:01-00:00

Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 6. (1 December 1999), pp. 789-839.

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement... is its own movement... is automatic expansion... able to add value to itself... living off-springs...golden eggs...an independent substance....It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus value of pound10 does the pound100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, pound110.3. Marx (1967, 1:171-73) The future must no longer be determined by the past....Anticipation is imperative...in order to be more than herself..."impossible" subject, untenable in a real social framework....But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies...she goes and passes into infinity....Heterogeneous, yes...she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you...she is everywhere, she exchanges...in the exchange that multiplies....She does not "know" what she's giving, she doesn't measure it...she finds not her sum but her differences....In one another we will never be lacking. Cixous (1986, 309-20) If God is dead, everything is permitted, then the conclusion imposing itself within the text of our experience is that the response to God is dead, is nothing is any longer permitted. Lacan (1991, 139) It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the metalevel, because capitalism itself is deconstructive. Karatani (1995, 71) 10.1177/0090591799027006005

ON "THE GIFT" IN TANNER's THEOLOGY: A PATRISTIC PARABLE

David Albertson — 2004-12-28T16:25:06-00:00

Modern Theology, Vol. 21, No. 1., 107.

Criticism of Heaven (Historical Materialism Book Series)

Roland Boer — 2008-05-10T20:27:55-00:00

(30 August 2007)

Why do some of the major Marxists of the twentieth century engage extensively with theology? What is the influence on their other work? This book explores the instersections between Marxism and theology in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj iek and Theodor Adorno.

Faith Beyond Nihilism: The Retrieval of Theism in Milbank and Taylor

Alexandra Klaushofer — 2008-05-09T23:47:47-00:00

The Heythrop Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2. (1999), pp. 135-149.

This article examines the thought of John Milbank and Charles Taylor, taking them as case studies which suggest, from a philosophical perspective, what a post-metaphysical conception of the religious might look like. It highlights, firstly, how their work takes on board many features of the Nietzschean critique of religion, eschewing foundationalism and absolutism, while retaining a positive notion of faith, as dogmatic theology for Millbank and as one viable form of meaning in modernity for Taylor. It identifies, secondly, the alternative grounding for such reconceptions as broadly communitarian in character, lying in the cultural and historical consitions of spiritual meanings and practices. This entails an immanent turn which removes the need for absolutist justifications and so undercuts claims for religious superiority. Milbank's postmodern Christian apologetics exemplifies such a position and yet at the same time involves exclusivist claims for the superiority of the Christian faith which, I argue, forecloses a genuine engagement with a pluralist reality. In contrast, Taylor's more tentative diagnosis of the state of Western culture and faith involves an openness to change and to the legitimacy of other accounts of moral reality, and signals how a new conception of the problem of faith and pluralism might emerge out of a refigured theism.

TRANSCENDENCE AND EPISTEMOLOGY: EXPLORING TRUTH VIA POST-SECULAR CHRISTIAN PLATONISM

Paul Tyson — 2008-03-12T05:13:17-00:00

Modern Theology, Vol. 24, No. 2. (April 2008), pp. 245-270.

The Market, the Multitude and Metaphysics: Ronald Preston's Middle Way and the Theological Critique of Economic Reason

Michael Northcott — 2008-04-30T13:09:12-00:00

Studies in Christian Ethics, Vol. 17, No. 2. (1 August 2004), pp. 104-117.

The European post-Marxist work Empire by Hardt and Negri points to the theological/metaphysical underpinnings of modernity and global capitalism in the medieval shift from Trinitarian orthodoxy to nominalism. Though Hardt and Negri reject religious or transcendental approaches to the social, their work shows remarkable resemblances with the ontological critique of modernity and economism mounted by John Milbank and Stephen Long among others. By contrast the considerable oeuvre of Ronald Preston on capitalism lacks a deep ontological critique. The return of ontology to theological economics in recent contributions from Gorringe, Long, Milbank and Northcott marks a significant recovery of a more theological orthodoxy, but also a more thoroughgoing critique of economism whether in capitalist or socialist guise. It is moreover a critique which highlights the significance of the economic actions of churches and Christians. 10.1177/095394680401700215