Religion & Philosophy

"Jeffrey W. Robbins has his finger on the pulse of current events. Radical Democracy and Political Theology comes as a welcome contribution to a very lively, very fresh conversation in (and surprisingly between) the fields of political philosophy and theology. It refuses the conservatism of most theologians who have weighed in on these matters, the neo-liberalism of their progressive counterparts, and the obstinate secularism of many political philosophers." — Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

"Jeffrey W. Robbins seeks to renew political theology by pulling it away from its conservative roots and giving it a democratic foundation. In the process, he shows democracy itself has to be rethought and radicalized. A fascinating and timely project." — Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire, Multitude: War and Democracay in the Age of Empire, and Commonwealth

"Jeffrey W. Robbins here develops a supplement to radical theology it has otherwise lacked, namely, a correspondingly radical politics. In sparkling, clear prose, he suggests this is to be found in a radicalized form of democracy, one freed from the shackles of modern liberalism and the last traces of transcendent sovereignty. A timely, distinctive, and provocative contribution to the ongoing debate on the role and nature of political theology today." — Gavin Hyman, University of Lancaster

"The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Clayton and Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively."
-- Santiago Zabala 

"This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality."
  -- Ward Blanton

This paper chronicles the dissolution of theology that takes place within 20th century protestant thought, which prepares the way for a new way of speaking got theology as a "strategy of intervention" or an "experiment in desire" befitting a religiously diverse world.

This is an editorial introduction for a special issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory on "The Politics of Fright."  Drawing on the Tillichian distinction between fear and anxiety, this paper makes a distinction between the politics of fear and the politics of fright, showing how the latter weds a neo-conservative political agenda with a fundamentalist religiosity.

This paper poses the questions of whether theological thinking is still valuable and viable in the postmodern age.  Using Schleiermacher as its inspiration, it sides with Gianni Vattimo over Merold Westphal in the contemporary debate about nature of religious belief and theological reflection.  It argues that a proper non-dogmatic theology is a form of thinking that can proceed with or without God.

This paper provides a literary analysis of Yann Martel's novel, "The Life of Pi."  Specifically, it considers why it makes the claim that it is a story that will make you believe in God.  What does this claim say about the nature of contemporary religious belief?  To address this question, the paper draws on religious theorists Steve Bruce and Marcel Gauchet.

With Gianni Vattimo's late collaborative works with Santiago Zabala, Vat-timo is proving to be not only a philosopher of emancipatory hermeneutics but also one who is making his own distinct contribution to liberation philosophy. This article critically explores Vattimo's liberationist weak thought in the context of the New Mate-rialisms. Though Vattimo's post-metaphysical hermeneutics lacks the linkage with the natural sciences and eschews the development of a political ontology, which are both characteristic of the New Materialisms, his deliberate reactivation and rehabilitation of Marx by way of Heidegger eventuates in an expressed preferential option for the poor. This animating concern with what Vattimo and Zabala term " the discharge of capitalism " restores the original animating spirit of Marx's dialectical materialism and thus makes the political dimension latent in materialist thought explicit and provides a new species of the New Materialisms.

This article sketches out five theses of radical theology to contribute to a vision of the future of theology. Radical theology emerged out of the Death-of-God theology of the 1960s, as well as some forms of liberation theology. These theologies challenge the orthodoxy of most traditional forms of theological and religious reflection. Here the authors, who are part of the conversation of radical theology in the United States and elsewhere, sketch out five theses: that radical theology should be postsecular, postliberal, a version of political or liberation theology, an onto-theology and an eco-theology. Each of these terms, however, needs to be qualified with a difference that distinguishes them from more common understandings of these terms. Finally, we argue that radical theology should be materialist in a non-reductionist way that reconfigures but does not simply dismiss our ideas about God, humanity, religion and the world. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.