Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology

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Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, Elias Ortega-Aponte
Fordham University Press, 2015 - Business & Economics - 446 pages

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.

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About the author (2015)

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 George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amidst the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances.