God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys

by Catherine Keller (editor)

The questions raised by use of American power and the advent of an "American empire," Keller argues, reveal a deeply troubled political unconscious that is wrestling with basic religious issues of power, terror, territory, and love. Keller traces our response to the current national, international, and religious situation to the deeply fraught legacy of Christian apocalypticism. Religious and political factions both left and right, she argues, read our situation in apocalyptic terms without truly understanding that complex legacy. After diving deeply into the multiple and conflicting political and religious meanings of the Book of Revelation, she proposes a counter-apocalypse, an anti-imperial political theology of love.

Genres: Theology

196 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Catherine Keller practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. As the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. She has all along mobilized, within and beyond Christian conversation, the transdisciplinary potential of feminist, philosophical and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her most recent books invite at once contemplative and social embodiments of our entangled difference: Cloud of the Impossible: *Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement* (2014), *Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology* (2017), and *Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public* (2018).

Since the start of the millennium she has served as executive director of the annual Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. These events have yielded 12 anthologies, mostly published by Fordham University Press; they include *Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and the New Materialisms* (coedited with Mary Jane Rubenstein); *Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation* (coedited with Laurel Schneider); *Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology* (coedited with Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Elías Ortega-Aponte); and *Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discourse.*

Twitter: @Prof_Keller

Reviews

[Curtis · Rating 2 out of 5]

The foreword and first chapter deserve 5 stars. After that, I became lost in Keller's writing style. The two stars is more for my inability to understand her than for a lack of content. Then again, with a degree in religion, perhaps she could write a bit easier. :)

[Jared · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unabashed deconstruction of historical Christianity.