The New Yoder

by Peter Dula, Chris K. Huebner

The work of John Howard Yoder has become increasingly influential in recent years. Moreover, it is gaining influence in some surprising places. No longer restricted to the world of theological ethicists and Mennonites, Yoder has been discovered as a refreshing voice by scholars working in many other fields. For thirty-five years, Yoder was known primarily as an articulate defender of Christian pacifism against a theological ethics guild dominated by the Troeltschian assumptions reflected in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. But in the last decade, there has been a clearly identifiable shift in direction. A new generation of scholars has begun reading Yoder alongside figures most often associated with post-structuralism, neo-Nietzscheanism, and post-colonialism, resulting in original and productive new readings of his work. At the same time, scholars from outside of theology and ethics departments, indeed outside of Christianity itself, like Romand Coles and Daniel Boyarin, have discovered in Yoder a significant conversation partner for their own work. This volume collects some of the best of those essays in hope of encouraging more such work from readers of Yoder and in hopes of attracting others to his important work.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Peter Dula and Chris K. Huebner 1 Judaism as a Free Footnotes to John Howard Yoder's The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, by Daniel Boyarin 2 The Christian Witness in the Earthly John Howard Yoder as Augustinian Interlocutor, by Gerald W. Schlabach 3 John Howard Yoder's Systematic Defense of Christian Pacifism, by Nancey Murphy 4 The War of the Postmodernity and Yoder's Eschatological Genealogy of Morals, by P. Travis Kroeker 5 Foucault, Genealogy, Confessions of an Errant Postmodernist, by Peter C. Blum 6 Yoder's Patience and/with Derrida's Differance, by Peter C. Blum 7 Patience, Witness, and the Scattered Body of Yoder and Virilio on Knowledge, Politics, and Speed, by Chris K. Huebner 8 On Yoder, Said, and a Politics of Land and Return, by Alain Epp Weaver 9 Memory in the Politics of Forgiveness, by J. Alexander Sider 10 Traumatic Violence and Christian Peacemaking, by Cynthia Hess 11 The Wild Patience of John Howard "Outsiders" and the "Otherness of the Church," by Romand Coles 12 Laughing With the Possibilities of Hope in John Howard Yoder and Jeffrey Stout, by Jonathan Tran 13 Epistemological Violence, Christianity, and the Secular, by Daniel Colucciello Barber 14 Fracturing Evangelical Recognitions of Inheriting the Radical Democracy of John Howard Yoder with the Penumbral Vision of Rowan Williams, by Joseph R. Wiebe 15 Communio Certeau, Yoder, and the Missionary Space of the Church, by Nathan R. Kerr List of Contributors

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010