Life among the Powers
A Political Spirituality of Resistance
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Theology
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
Many Christians have come to see that they live in a world marked by structural problems--legacies of racial injustice, climate change, constraining forms of gender and sexuality, to name just a few. A faithful response to these problems calls for ethical and political witness, and theologians have used the New Testament language describing the "principalities and powers" to provide just that: a picture of faith in which Christ redeems humanity from structures of power. This tradition, though, sometimes offers the hope of an "outside," ways of living in which we can be no longer complicit with the powers. This book pushes this conversation further, seeking a theological understanding--and the spirituality that lives within it--of how we are implicated in such structures, what we are called to do to resist their harms, and who we might still become. Along the way, it reads together unlikely fellow-travelers Karl Barth and Michel Foucault to argue that while our complicity with the powers is inescapable, we can still live meaningfully different, movingly faithful lives that challenge the forms of the world that we believe are passing away.
Endorsements (4)
“Rick Elgendy brings greater analytic rigor and clarity to the politically potent discourse of the powers and principalities. His realism about our inescapable complicity in structural evil adds significant ethical illumination. Perhaps even more critically, it funds a spirituality of faithful resistance nourished by Christian commitments and critical self-awareness. A genuine gift to the evolving literature of political theology.”
“This is an elegant, smart, insightful, and timely work. Rick Elgendy’s leading insight, to the effect that Christianity is not exterior to the powers-that-be but that this does not preclude meaningful resistance, is provocative, yet he argues compellingly and often movingly on its behalf. This is just the sort of insight we need right now, at a moment when so many of us are trying to discern what it might mean to tackle structural evils. Anyone who cares about these things will be glad to find this book. I heartily recommend it.”
“Ranging effortlessly across disparate canons, Rick Elgendy offers sparkling new insight into vexing questions about the very possibility of resistance to the powers. His analysis of our predicament is at once bracing and hopeful. In this moment of crisis for church and world alike, this book is a needed word.”
“Rick Elgendy recognizes one of the most pressing questions in political life today—how do you live in a world where active collaboration with manifest evil seems sometimes unavoidable, and tacit complicity seems at best inescapable? For Christians in particular, what does it mean to pray ‘thy kingdom come’ in a world like ours, beset by Powers and Principalities radically opposed to the way of Jesus? Elgendy offers a highly creative answer to these questions, one with real theoretical and theological depth and genuine colloquial accessibility, innovatively using figures heretofore never put in serious conversation.”
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