Ten Theology Books to Watch For – November 2024

Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage

Cynthia Moe-Lodbeda

(Fortress Press)

This introductory volume in the Building a Moral Economy series invites readers into a new vision for the future of economic life together. Ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda crafts a compelling case for a new moral economy: its vital importance, the pivotal role religious networks can play, and the varied forms of action needed. Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage is grounded in the stories of real people, with real struggles, triumphs, and creative energy. Moe-Lobeda invites readers to imagine an equitable, ecological, and democratic economy for themselves and their descendants and provides wise guidance for living into that vision.

Readers will re-see economies as webs of relationship and will root economic life in the great love story–the story of God’s astounding love for all creation, and God’s call to align our lives with that love. Readers will encounter the work of economic transformation as a sacred journey–a journey of healing diseased relationships with Earth, with self, with neighbors far and near, and with the Sacred Source whom many call God. Moe-Lobeda conveys this as a journey of freedom to live as beings in community–human community, planetary community, and community with God.

Moe-Lobeda’s accessible prose explicitly faces the paradox of enormous moral challenges such as climate change held together with infinite hope. Welcoming readers into the vibrant global movement to build life-giving forms of economic life, she seeks to develop a sense of empowered agency. Are we the disinterested individuals motivated by material self-interest that neoclassical economics declared us to be, or are humans called to “think with” others, past, present, and future, seeking communion with all creation? Moe-Lobeda argues that our lives and Earth’s well-being depend on choosing the latter path. The work is urgent; the time to embark on these pathways of restorative justice is now.

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Jeff McSwain

(Cascade Books)

In this volume McSwain continues to deploy Karl Barth, Julian of Norwich, Athanasius, James Cone, and dozens of others to buttress his claim about human duplicity and the Easter asymmetry which allows us to properly interpret our lives by the gospel. Specifically, the focus is on Christ’s cross which provides the radical discontinuity (judgment) needed to preserve the continuity of God’s good creation. In resurrection light we see the inner connection of re-creation to creation, an atonement that disentangles good from evil, righteousness from sin, and life from death. Even though the perfect clarity of this liberating separation is reserved for judgment day, this same judgment of grace frees us to live now as “eschatological activists” in the Liberator’s way of justice and peace. In view of the cross, the Spirit empowers us to live in the hidden truth of who Christ is and who we have always been in Christ, as God’s beloved in the Trinitarian communion. McSwain’s cosmic vision pictures all people sharing in Christ’s sufferings and also in his glory. Thus, the reconciled human community genuinely participates “as one” in Christ’s victory over sin, death, and the devil.

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