Month: September 2022

Book by Mårten Björk on Bloomsbury.

The Politics of Immortality in Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg Theology and Resistance Between 1914-1945.

Highlighting the central importance of theological configurations of immortality and eternal life from 1914-1945, Mårten Björk explores the key writings of Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth and Oskar Goldberg to situate their ideas in relation to the political turmoil of the period, including the rise of social Darwinism, nationalism and fascism.

The conversations happening among Christian and Jewish theologians and philosophers on the nature of immortality and eternal life during the period constitute what Björk calls a ‘politics of immortality’. The speculative question of eternal life became a way to address the meaning of ‘a good life’ in a period when millions of lives were lost to war, camps and prisons. This book shows how theology was related to central political concepts and ideas of the era, revealing how the question of immortality pursued by Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg became a way to resist the reduction of life to race, blood and soil.

By situating the exact political consequences of theological and metaphysical theories of immortality and eternal life, Björk’s discussion of Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg confronts the perennial question on the relation between life and death and exposes the important connections between political theology and philosophical posthumanism. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Yearning for a System: Franz Rosenzweig and the Great Paganism of Life
2. Abundance and Scarcity: Karl Barth and the Struggle for Existence
3. The Animal of the Infinite: Oskar Goldberg and the Science of Evil
4. Life Outside Life: Theology and Resistance  

Article by Joel Gillin in Studia theologica.

This article examines the place of religion and metaphysics in the agonistic political theory of Chantal Mouffe. The first section introduces Mouffe’s agonistic project and points to its normative postsecular implications. The second section presents her key engagements with religion and shows a development in her thought from a more restrictive secularist model toward a more open approach to religion in the public sphere. I suggest that an uncritical adoption of a modern view of religion is a hindrance to her account and in tension with her agonistic assumptions. In the final section I examine how Mouffe deals with the limits of pluralism and religious interventions in politics and argue that her agonistic theory has insufficiently recognized the inescapability of faith and metaphysics in political theorizing. I suggest that adopting a more postsecular agonism would promote rather than squash pluralism and increase the terrain of political contestation and democratic possibilities.