Common Goods Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology

by Johnson-DeBaufre, Melanie; Keller, Catherine; Ortega-Aponte, Elias

• ISBN13: 9780823268443
• ISBN10: 0823268446
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-12-01
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Drew Theological School. She specializes in the politics, ethics, and materiality of ancient Christianity and its interpretation in the present. She is the author of Jesus Among Her Children: Q, Eschatology, and the Construction of Christian Origins, and co author, with Jane Schaberg, of Mary Magdalene Understood. She is currently working on a book using spatial theory to reimagine the Pauline assemblies as politically productive and contested spaces.

Catherine Keller is the George T. Cobb Professor of Christian Theology at Drew Theological School. A prolific writer and sought after lecturer, Keller's work develops the relational potential of a theology of becoming in the interplay of ecological and gender politics with process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy, and religious pluralism. Her latest book, Cloud of the Impossible, explores how negative theology--the mystical unknowability of God--folds into a relational perspective that affirms movement toward justice and planetary conviviality.

Elias Ortega-Aponte is Assistant Professor of Afro-Latina/o Religions and Cultural Studies at Drew Theological Seminary.