The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor’s award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of “Lockdown America” and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a “theatrics of state terror,” Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the US a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a “counter-theatrics to state terror,” a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples’ movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms “a liberating material spirituality” to unseat the state that kills.

"Princeton's Mark Lewis Taylor has always worked at the intersection of the political and theological. Now, in this intense and exciting work, he explores in a systematic way how those two dimensions of human reality can be conceived anew and together.Taylor argues that the decline of political discourse, the justification of torture and preemptive war, mass incarceration, the misuse of religion to justify atrocity, and most especially the sheer weight of suffering in the world¹all these developments urge us to reconceive theology itself. In conjunction with the latest insights of political theory, decolonial thought, and spectral theories in contemporary philosophy, Taylor suggests that the political is the context of the theological and a realm in which we can discern, beyond simple categories of transcendence and immanence, a transimmanence that is theologically illuminative and politically liberating" -- Publisher description.

Christian theology needs to be reconstructed in light of recent and momentous intellectual changes, social revolutions, and steep pedagogical challenges. That is the conviction of many of North America's leading theologians whose close collaboration over several years bring us this exciting volume. Reconstructing Christian Theology introduces theology in such a way that readers can discern the relevance of historical materials, pose theological questions, and begin to think theologically for themselves. Further, like other projects of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology, this volume stems from a deep desire to model a credible, creative, and engaged contemporary theology. So each chapter tackles major Christian teaching, juxtaposes it with a significant social or cultural challenge, and then reconstructs each in light of the other. The result is an innovative and compelling way to learn how theology can contribute to rethinking the most pressing issues of our day.

"... Probes the 'hermeneutic of suspicion' in recent anthropological interpretations of religious phenomena, focusing on the work of Claude Levi-Strauss and Marvin Harris..." - Publisher.

Princeton theologian Mark Taylor here looks at the influence and stance of the right-wing Christian movement in the U.S. He questions its religious authenticity, its claim to be called Christian, and the ethical stands it has taken in national politics of the last ten years. The heart of Taylor's argument is Jesus himself. Using the latest New Testament scholarship on the historical Jesus and his tactic in relation to the Roman Empire, Taylor argues that Jesus' life and work and message are inherently political and driven by the need to show God's love for the poor, condemnation of the oppressor, and search for a reign of justice. These Christian hallmarks, Taylor asserts, stand as a critical corrective to a distorted Christianity that often dominates the U.S. political scene today.

Remembering Esperanza has been acclaimed as this generation's most important synthesis of critical theory and Christian theology. Taylor offers North American models of a new theology that serves an informed, critical transformative praxis of resistance to sexism, classism, racism. Taylor's work forges a vital link to an engaged Christianity and the Christ who is its source.

The Political Theology of Paul Tillich explores the political theology of one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, Paul Tillich, whose life and scholarship were decisively shaped by his experiences during World War I, his resistance to the rising scourge of Nazism in Germany, and his subsequent immigration to the United States. Tillich’s discerning analysis of fascism, grounded in his socialist commitments, and his continuing efforts to write theology in correlation with culture, make his voice a crucial one for contemporary political theology. The contributors to this volume represent different generations, social and cultural locations, and nationalities Together, they explore Tillich’s early work on religious socialism and its lingering presence in his later systematic theology, bring him into dialogue with liberation theologies, apply his thought to contemporary political concerns, and show the significance of his method of correlation for theological scholarship that engages culture, thereby presenting a case for the continued relevance of Tillich for political theology.