Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption traces some of the economic connotations of the theological doctrine of redemption. Using three "figurations"—the rich young man, the widow with two copper coins, and redemption through Christ's "down payment" for human deliverance—the book traces the way in which economic status is linked to the state of grace in early Christian texts. Using feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories as tools to read ancient texts, this book tries to retrieve subversive economic agency for the complex locations of self and society in a globalized, networked age of tragic and hopeful interdependencies. The figure of the trickster, often suspended between deceiver and deliverer, helps reconstruct a flexibly located, thoughtful, and hopeful way of incarnating traces of divine economy in the life of persons and communities.
The originality of Of Divine Economy lies not only in its insistence on reading the theological locus of redemption as an economic metaphor, but also in its focus on the economic subtexts of Christian society's economic constructions. Grau's unique project merges together economic, historical, literary, and psycho-social analysis with theological critique and construction.
