Ten Theology Books to Watch For – May 2025

Loving through Enmity: Healing the Broken Heart of Christian Antiracist Work

Marvin E. Wickware, Jr.

( Fortress Press )

Loving through Enmity responds to the failure of US Christian antiracist work to translate love of the enemy into meaningful societal transformation. Beginning with an analysis of the racial enmity that is fundamental to white supremacy, Wickware clarifies an oft-elided distinction between private and structural enmity. While systemic opposition of interests between white and BIPOC Christians is the core enmity at play in white supremacy, Christian antiracist work too often centers individual slights, struggles, and forgiveness.

Centering structural enmity, Wickware explores how white supremacy produces and circulates a distorted love that takes as its goal the happiness of white people and demands sacrifice from those who challenge white happiness through the pursuit of mutuality. As a step toward articulating a more faithful love, he offers an account of Black love as a transformative, politically powerful emotion directed toward mutual care.

Building on that account of Black love, Wickware reimagines divine power and love in terms of God’s power to sustain connection, holy need for relationship with creation, and desire for creaturely thriving. Ultimately, faithful love of the enemy mirrors God’s love and involves embracing our need for those whose interests are structurally opposed to ours under the conditions of white supremacy, engaging in mutual aid, and committing to accountability toward one another’s need for self-love. Scholars and ministers alike will benefit from Wickware’s insightful conclusions.

ADVERTISEMENT:

Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship 
Lynn A. Cooper

(Fortress Press)

Catholicism entails a challenge. The word catholic means “universal.” Yet, that universality is expressed through different rites, languages, jurisdictions, and states of life that are unique and concrete. Today Catholicism’s universality faces a still further challenge. It must share the world not only with Protestants of various kinds, but also with adherents of other faiths (and none). In the decades since Vatican II and the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, the question of religious difference has itself become more concrete. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus live among and alongside Protestants and Catholics in neighborhoods across the globe. How does this practical reality square with Catholicism’s understanding of itself and its neighbors?

In Embracing Our Time, university chaplain Lynn Cooper provides practical resources for interfaith engagement rooted in a Catholic perspective. Drawing on Trinitarian, sacramental, and feminist theologies, Cooper shows that interreligious collaboration is a concrete expression of the interdependence at the heart of Catholic faith. Embracing Our Time centers the lived experiences of Catholics and employs theological reflection, composite storytelling, and spiritual provocations to guide readers on an inner journey, inviting them to a deep reading of their lives and communities. Cooper empowers lay folks to be conscientious interfaith leaders within their communities and congregations, not because they are experts in their tradition, but because the Christian call to friendship across and within difference is at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.

<<<<< PREV. PAGE |
NEXT PAGE >>>>>
PAGE 3 of 5