Remaking Humanity: Embodiment and Hope in Catholic Theology
Ebook
Drawing upon Edward Schillebeeckx's theology and Judith Butler's philosophy, Adam Beyt uses the framework of nonviolent hope to construct a Catholic political theology responding to dehumanizing violence. Dehumanizing violence names words, institutions, or acts violating the inherent dignity of being made in the image and likeness of God. Theology can participate in dehumanizing violence by claiming an uninterrogated universality that marginalizes bodies due to their perceived differences such as gender, race, sexuality, or ability.
The book's constructive project integrates Schillebeeckx's and Butler's thought with queer theory and phenomenology to model embodiment as an “enfleshing dynamism” between bodies and signification. The text then posits Catholic discipleship as incarnating hope by defending the humanum, the new humanity announced through God's Reign. Combining reflections from Schillebeeckx and Butler, this hope centers discipleship as nonviolent world building. Concluding with a sustained reflection with the writings of Franz Fanon and Walter Benjamin, the final chapter sketches a Catholic solidaristic response to contemporary struggles against the necropolitics of colonizing and state violence through assemblies of hope.
Integrates the thought of Edward Schillebeeckx and Judith Butler to propose a Catholic nonviolent hope to account for embodied difference.
First book-length integration of Butler's thought into Catholic systematic theology and ethics; also integrates their work in its entirety, including their earlier work on embodiment and their more recent work on nonviolence.
This text applies tackles an influential Catholic theologian from a fresh perspective, by examining Schillebeeckx's perspective on embodiment.
This work contributes to salient conversations about gender and race for Catholic conversations about social justice.
Introduction
Chapter One
AN UNFULFILLED PROMISE: Catholic Theological Anthropology and Harmful Discipleship
Chapter Two
THE INCARNATED SELF: Finitude, Embodied Experience, and Mediated Immediacy
Chapter Three
THE BODY AS AN ENFLESHED DYNAMISM: Schillebeeckx's Sacramental Theology and the Chiasm of Merleau-Ponty
Chapter Four
ANTHROPOLOGICAL APOPHASIS: Butler and the Philosophy of the "Human"
Chapter Five
INCARNATING HOPE: Schillebeeckx's Mystical-Political Discipleship
Chapter Six
BUTLER AND NONVIOLENT HOPE
Chapter Seven
THE FORCE OF HOPE: Freedom from Necropolitics
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Adam Beyt's Remaking Humanity expresses the ontological vulnerability of embodied existence in a sacramental mode. This is both a provocative and constructive proposal for a theology that takes the experience of having and being a body seriously-including all of the dynamism, instability, and vulnerability that this entails. With the work of Edward Schillebeeckx as a starting point, Beyt builds from thinkers like Bulter, Merleau-Ponty, and Mbembe in pursuit of a mystical political practice involving the whole person. This book is a Thomistically grounded work of political theology that is steeped in the sacramental imagination, allowing it to run through doors pushed open by Schillebeeckx and earlier generations of scholars. Beyt imagines 'incarnating hope' in a way that expands the borders of the Rule of God beyond polarized binaries, exclusions, and inherited structures of violence.
Beyt's Remaking Humanity prompts a serious rethinking of any Catholic theological anthropology by juxtaposing a violence latent at the heart of a 'theology of the body' with a phenomenology of embodiment that strives to recognize the politics of marginalization always at work in theological discourses. By reading the Incarnation with Judith Butler and locating 'assemblies of hope' with Fanon and Mbembe, Beyt presents us with a nothing less than a detailed roadmap for an experience of grace that resonates deeply with the complex and multifaceted bodies that we actually inhabit in our everyday lives.
- Title: Remaking Humanity: Embodiment and Hope in Catholic Theology
- Author: Adam Beyt
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780567714183, 9780567714169, 0567714160, 0567714187
- Resource ID: LLS:9780567714183
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-21T00:11:38Z
Adam Beyt is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Norbert College, USA.