Author: Jack David Eller
Publisher: Gcrr Press
ISBN: 9780578807300
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
For millennia, a fundamental question of culture and law has been the relationship between religion and ruler, or more recently between church and state. Although the term "political theology" was not always known, the question remained and was answered in various ways: theocracy, the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven, the rule of jurists, and so forth. Almost a century ago, Carl Schmitt revived political theology and reshaped it into a less theological and more political subject with his famous notions of sovereignty and the exception. Schmitt highlighted the eternal struggle between power or authority on the one hand and positive law and political institutions on the other, arguing that law can never entirely legitimize or constrain power or authority and that the real site and source of law is the moment of exception and of "the decision." Trump and Political Theology applies this Schmittian lens to Donald Trump, an exceptional president who seems to use his executive and decision-making power to flaunt law and truth, to cripple and discredit institutions, and to bend reality to his will. The book considers first whether Trump is an aspiring Schmittian sovereign and therefore a threat to democracy. But it goes beyond Trump and Trumpism to critique and rethink political theology in the light of contemporary, especially populist and authoritarian, politics. Finally, it compels us to critique and rethink theology itself as a tool for understanding and organizing politics and society, restoring the relevance of myth and ritual and of pre-Christian and non-Christian characters like the shaman and the trickster for modern politics and social theory.
Author: Ronald J. Sider
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 172527180X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
What should Christians think about Donald Trump? His policies, his style, his personal life? Thirty evangelical Christians (listed below) wrestle with these tough questions. They are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. They don't all agree, but they seek to let Christ be the Lord of their political views. They seek to apply biblical standards to difficult debates about our current political situation. Vast numbers of white evangelicals enthusiastically support Donald Trump. Do biblical standards on truth, justice, life, freedom, and personal integrity warrant or challenge that support? How does that support of President Trump affect the image of Christianity in the larger culture? Around the world? Many younger evangelicals today are rejecting evangelical Christianity, even Christianity itself. To what extent is that because of widespread evangelical support for Donald Trump? Don't read this book to find support for your views. Read it to be challenged--with facts, reason, and biblical principles. With contributions from: Michael W. Austin Randall Balmer Vicki Courtney Daniel Deitrich Samuel Escobar John Fea Irene Fowler Mark Galli J. Colin Harris Stephen R. Haynes Matt Henderson Christopher A. Hutchinson Bandy X. Lee David S. Lim David C. Ludden Ryan McAnnally-Linz Steven Meyer Napp Nazworth D. Zac Niringiye Christopher Pieper Reid Ribble Ronald J. Sider Edward G. Simmons James R. Skillen James W. Skillen Julia K. Stronks Chris Thurman Miroslav Volf Peter Wehner George Yancey
Author: De La Torre, Miguel A.
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 160833712X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Many people of faith have identified the election of Donald Trump as a confessional crisis--a moment that calls into question the deepest meaning of our religious claims and values. This book gathers reflections by a range of scholars and activists from numerous religious and denominational perspectives to address that crisis. Among the themes treated are disability issues, the LGBT community, gender and race, immigration, the environment, peace, and poverty.
Author: Jeffrey W. Robbins
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532608861
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
This book is a work of theological resistance. It is not so much about the presidency of Donald Trump as it is about what his popularity and rise to power reveal about the state of Christianity and the moral character of the evangelical Right in the United States today. More specifically, it is about the threat of white Christian nationalism, which is the particular form that the nationalist populist movement of Trumpism has adopted for itself. The contributors are all fellows from the Westar Institute’s academic seminar on God and the Human Future, and include many of the leading figures in theology and Continental philosophy of religion. This volume provides a form of theopolitical resistance based on intersectionality. The authors recognize how the various forms of oppression interrelate to contribute to a vast, dynamic, and seeming impenetrable network of systemic injustice and marginalization. These essays demonstrate that politics need not be played as a zero-sum game with a winner-take-all mentality, and that a critical theology is as urgently needed and as relevant now as ever.
Author: James K. A. Smith
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493406604
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
In this culmination of his widely read and highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies project, James K. A. Smith examines politics through the lens of liturgy. What if, he asks, citizens are not only thinkers or believers but also lovers? Smith explores how our analysis of political institutions would look different if we viewed them as incubators of love-shaping practices--not merely governing us but forming what we love. How would our political engagement change if we weren't simply looking for permission to express our "views" in the political sphere but actually hoped to shape the ethos of a nation, a state, or a municipality to foster a way of life that bends toward shalom? This book offers a well-rounded public theology as an alternative to contemporary debates about politics. Smith explores the religious nature of politics and the political nature of Christian worship, sketching how the worship of the church propels us to be invested in forging the common good. This book creatively merges theological and philosophical reflection with illustrations from film, novels, and music and includes helpful exposition and contemporary commentary on key figures in political theology.
Author: Ralph Reed
Publisher: Regnery
ISBN: 1684510570
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Donald Trump—Defender of Religious Freedom In 2016, many Christian leaders at first opposed candidate Donald Trump. He was a former social liberal, and his occasional vulgarity, multiple marriages and divorces, and tabloid scandals made it impossible for him to defend Christian values in public life. Or so they thought. Trump nevertheless won four-fifths of the Evangelical vote in 2016, as well as the majority of the Catholic vote. And in 2020, the idea that he can’t represent Christians is demonstrably false. He has been the most ardent and effective presidential defender of religious liberty and the pro-life cause since Ronald Reagan—and perhaps in U.S. history. In For God and Country, Dr. Ralph Reed draws on his deep knowledge of American history, his unsurpassed experience as a political strategist, his personal dealings with President Trump and the First Family, and his moral commitment as a Christian to show why Catholics and Evangelicals should continue to strongly support their unlikely champion. In For God and Country, Reed reveals: The sincerity of President Trump’s defense of the Christian faith—and why he has delivered policy victories when other pro-Christian presidents haven’t Why Trump is the most pro-Israel president in American history How liberals hope to demoralize Christians—and thus defeat Donald Trump and reverse his pro-life, pro-family, pro–religious freedom policies Why Never-Trump Christians naively preach de facto political surrender For God and Country is not just required reading for the 2020 election; it is required reading for every conservative Christian who loves America and wants to return it to Christian values.
Author: Spencer Jackson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
When British and American leaders today talk of the nation—whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought, and the literature that accompanied Britain’s rise to imperial prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here to a body of literature long associated with modernity’s origins without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century British literature are the products of the politicization of religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and religious at once—products of a modern political faith that has authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth century to the present.
Author: Andrew S. Moore
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174866
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Using as their starting point a 1976 Newsweek cover story on the emerging politicization of evangelical Christians, contributors to Evangelicals and Presidential Politics engage the scholarly literature on evangelicalism from a variety of angles to offer new answers to persisting questions about the movement. The standard historical narrative describes the period between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the early 1970s as a silent one for evangelicals, and when they did re-engage in the political arena, it was over abortion. Randall J. Stephens and Randall Balmer challenge that narrative. Stephens moves the starting point earlier in the twentieth century, and Balmer concludes that race, not abortion, initially motivated activists. In his examination of the relationship between African Americans and evangelicalism, Dan Wells uses the Newsweek story’s sidebar on Black activist and born-again Christian Eldridge Cleaver to illuminate the former Black Panther’s uneasy association with white evangelicals. Daniel K. Williams, Allison Vander Broek, and J. Brooks Flippen explore the tie between evangelicals and the anti-abortion movement as well as the political ramifications of their anti-abortion stance. The election of 1976 helped to politicize abortion, which both encouraged a realignment of alliances and altered evangelicals’ expectations for candidates, developments that continue into the twenty-first century. Also in 1976, Foy Valentine, leader of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, endeavored to distinguish the South’s brand of Protestant Christianity from the evangelicalism described by Newsweek. Nevertheless, Southern Baptists quickly became associated with the evangelicalism of the Religious Right and the South’s shift to the Republican Party. Jeff Frederick discusses evangelicals’ politicization from the 1970s into the twenty-first century, suggesting that southern religiosity has suffered as southern evangelicals surrendered their authenticity and adopted a moral relativism that they criticized in others. R. Ward Holder and Hannah Dick examine political evangelicalism in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Holder lays bare the compromises that many Southern Baptists had to make to justify their support for Trump, who did not share their religious or moral values. Hannah Dick focuses on media coverage of Trump’s 2016 campaign and contends that major news outlets misunderstood the relationship between Trump and evangelicals, and between evangelicals and politics in general. The result, she suggests, was that the media severely miscalculated Trump’s chances of winning the election.
Author: Saul Newman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509528431
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
God is dead, but his presence lives on in politics. This is the problem of political theology: the way that theological ideas find their way into secular political institutions, particularly the sovereign state. In this intellectual tour-de-force, leading political theorist Saul Newman shows how political theology arose alongside secularism, and relates to the problem of legitimising power and authority in modernity. It is not about the power of religion so much as about the religion of power. Examining the current crisis of the liberal order, he argues that recent phenomena such as the rise of populism, the renewed demand for strong national sovereignty and the return of religious fundamentalism may be understood through this paradigm. He illustrates his argument through an exploration of themes such as sovereignty, democracy, economics, technology, ecological catastrophe, messianism and the future of radical politics, engaging with thinkers ranging from Schmitt and Hobbes to Stirner, Foucault, and Agamben. This book will be a crucial text for all students, scholars and general readers interested in the meaning and significance of political theology for political theory.
Author: Philip S. Gorski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000069133
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
Why did 81 percent of white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump in 2016? And what does this tell us about the relationship between Christianity and democracy in the United States? American Babylon places our present political moment against a deep historical backdrop. In Part I the author traces the development of democratic institutions from Ancient Greece through to the American Revolution and of Christian political theology from Augustine to Falwell. Part II charts the decline of democratic governance within American churches; explains the capture of evangelical Christianity by the Republican Party; and denounces the fateful embrace between white Christian nationalists and right-wing populists that culminated in Trump’s victory. An accessible and timely book, American Babylon is essential reading for those concerned with the vexed relationship of religion and politics in the United States, including students and scholars in the fields of divinity, history, political science, religious studies, and sociology.
