Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics

This volume brings together established and rising scholars to revitalize political theology by examining conceptions of power that work beyond sovereign power. The hope is to reexamine the character of authority by attending to the multiple, various, but often under-appreciated ways that power is exercised in the contemporary world.

Do those in authority wield all the power, or do those who stand before and under authority also exercise power? What kinds of power are available to us? How must we reconfigure how conceptions of authority once we recognize the multiple and various forms that power takes? In this volume, established and rising scholars in theology and ethics respond to these questions in order to revitalize the discipline of political theology. While traditional and recent approaches to political theology focus on issues of sovereignty and presume specific analogies between the divine and the human, the essays here attend to power''s variety, offering alternative conceptions of divine and human authority meant to encourage just and humane social practices. Power, it turns out, is entangled in love, revelation, language, cultural creativity, and pluralization. By beginning with such themes, the contributors seek to renegotiate the conceptual terrain between power, theology, and politics.