Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology

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: Melanie Johnson-Debaufre, Catherine Keller, Elias Ortega-Aponte
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 12/01/2015
Pages: 456
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780823268443

About the Author

Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre is an 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 (Harvard University Press, 2006), and coauthor, with Jane Schaberg, of Mary Magdalene Understood (Continuum, 2006). She is currently working on a book using spatial theory to reimagine the Pauline assemblies as politically productive and contested spaces.

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at the Theological School of Drew University. She is the author and editor of numerous books including Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Engagement (Columbia, 2015); On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Fortress, 2008); God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Fortress, 2005); Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003), and Ecospirit: Theologies and Philosophies of the Earth (Fordham, 2007).

Elias Ortega-Aponte is an assistant professor of Afro-Latina/o religions and cultural studies at Drew Theological School. His research focuses on the intersections between race, gender, punishment, and economics. Currently, he is working on a book-length project mobilizing insights from black and
brown power movements to proposed a religious abolitionist ethics of the prison-industrial complex.