Ten Theology Books to Watch For – October 2024

Mysticism 

Simon Critchley

(NYR Books)

A probing, inspiring exploration of mysticism not as religious practice but as a mode of experience and way of life by one of the most provocative philosophical thinkers of our time.

Why mysticism? It has been called “experience in its most intense form,” and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the reader: Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.

Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It’s not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. A rough and ready definition of mysticism is that it is a way of systematically freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Mysticism is the practical possibility of the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.

This is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. It is also a book about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, T.S. Eliot, and Nick Cave. It shows how listening to music can be secular worship. It is a book full of learning, puzzlement, pleasure, and wonder. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life.

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The Proverbial Woman: Class, Gender, and Power in Hebrew Poetry

Amy J. Chase

(Fortress Press)

Female identity is fraught and fetishized, commercialized and contested–so potent a weapon in contemporary cultural warfare that a sitting US senator had no shame in asking a nominee to the Supreme Court to “define ‘woman.'” But the battle over female identity is not of modern invention. Its roots are ancient. And in the Hebrew Bible, one text has served as the focal point of both classical and fashionable conceptions of female identity: Proverbs 31. A timeless pattern of femininity for some and a punchline for others, the poems themselves have received wildly differing levels of analysis, with too much ink spent on “the ideal woman,” and far too little on political rebukes and economic displacement.

The Proverbial Woman offers a comprehensive narrative and dialogical approach to the text that unearths the poetry’s social, sexual, and political silences and silencings. It highlights the forgotten characters: the women who destroy kings, the silenced poor, displaced peasants, and foreigners. It examines the text’s conflict, setting, characters, and dialogue. It encourages the reader to recognize the drama taking place in the text’s world and to explore how these features enabled an ancient community pondering these sapiential lines to process their cooperation with empire in an economic system that benefited some and exploited others.

The Proverbial Woman excavates the power dynamics that promote elite ideologies even as gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions enable marginalized perspectives within the text to resist them. The interpretive approach demonstrated in this study can be replicated among communities today wanting to use biblical texts to construct for themselves a more just and prosperous world.

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