What Is Political Theology?
Luke Bretherton author Valentina Napolitano author Vincent W Lloyd author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:16th Dec '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Political theology is widely discussed but little understood. Across the humanities and critical social sciences, even in popular discussion of current events, it has become a buzzword. Yet there is no consensus about its very definition.
This field-changing interdisciplinary book brings together three of the leading voices in political theology—a Christian theologian, a critical theorist, and an anthropologist—to offer new entry points to understand religion and politics. They explore similarities and differences in their approaches, guiding readers through scholarship in their own fields while also advancing a shared vision that speaks to crucial questions of justice in the contemporary world.
Rejecting the notion that political theology is a closed field with an established canon, the authors show it to be an open-ended, lively conversation that welcomes new participants. They demonstrate how voices and approaches from decolonial theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism, and ethnography, both in the Global North and in the Global South, are transforming the field.
This book addresses concerns about political theology’s ties to authoritarian and antidemocratic movements, demonstrating that an engaged political theology sheds critical light on volatile topics such as populism, racism, and ethnoreligious nationalism. At once accessible to students and groundbreaking for scholars, What Is Political Theology? provides a state-of-the-art global understanding.
Three cutting-edge thinkers offer different approaches to political theology, summoned up from a wealth of wide-ranging and impressive research. They open up new horizons for the discipline, showing the breadth and complexity of political theology while breaking the grip of the European canon that goes all the way back to Carl Schmitt. What Is Political Theology? will attract the attention and earn the respect of readers across disciplines and generations. -- John D. Caputo, author of What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology
Political theology—or politics tethered to ultimate concern—is inescapable. The authors of this powerful and necessary book take this observation down fresh paths, proposing a series of approaches to political theology for a new generation. Recommended for anyone in search of new ways of conceiving of, and responding to, the drive to mastery that characterizes modern politics. -- Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States
In lucid and urgent prose, Bretherton, Lloyd, and Napolitano, each in their different ways, make a quietly groundbreaking case for doing political theology today. What Is Political Theology? is a rich resource, protean and inspiring, gathering energy from diverse fields and archives, a model of politically engaged interdisciplinary dialogue. -- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law
At a time when the fractures in our common democratic life in the West are becoming ever more rancorous and divisive, we need a mode of political theology that offers us clarity without sacrificing depth, passion without jettisoning reason, and commitment without myopic partisanship. Written by three of the leading theorists in the field, What Is Political Theology? is a must read for our troubled times. -- Anthony G. Reddie, professor of Black theology, University of Oxford
ISBN: 9780231222143
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
312 pages