Ten Theology Books to Watch For – March 2019

Edible Entanglements:
On a Political Theology of Food

S. Yael Dennis

Cacade Books

Obesity in the Global North and starvation in the Global South can be attributed to the same cause: the concentration of enormous power in the hands of transnational agricultural corporations. The food sovereignty movement has arisen as the major challenger to the corporate food regime. The concept of sovereignty is central to the discursive field of political theology, yet seldom if ever have its theoretical insights been applied to the concept of sovereignty as it appears in global food politics.

Food politics operates simultaneously in several registers: individual, national, transnational, and ecological. A politics of food takes a transdisciplinary approach to analyzing Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty in each of these registers, employing Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy to elucidate vulnerability in the national and transnational registers; Jane Bennett’s vibrant materiality, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and nutritional science to describe the social production of classed bodies in the individual and national registers; data from climate science and the political ecology of Bruno Latour to examine the impact of sovereignty in the ecological register. Catherine Keller’s theology of becoming and Paulina Ochoa Espejo’s people as process will be explored for their capacity to enliven a democratic political theology of food.

[easyazon_link identifier=”1498296963″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Performing the Gospel: Exploring the Borderland of Worship, Entertainment, and the Arts[/easyazon_link]

Deborah Sokolove

Cascade Books

What is the difference between good worship and good entertainment? Too often, people disparage some aspect of worship by calling it “just entertainment” or “just a performance.” Others say that they do not need to go to church because they have profound spiritual or even religious experiences at concerts, plays, movies, or dances. How is worship different from these performing arts? How is art different from entertainment? This book looks at the history of the performing arts both in worship and as worship, with particular attention to the attitudes that shape our ideas about both worship and entertainment. Working definitions of words like “art,” “excellence,” “liturgy,” and “play” help to illuminate what different people mean when they use them in conversations about Christian worship. Putting theological, scriptural, and practical writings on worship and the performing arts in conversation with interviews with dancers, musicians, actors, preachers, and liturgical scholars, this volume is intended to help pastors, performers, and everyone who plans, leads, or cares about worship talk with one another in mutually respectful and helpful ways.

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