This article engages the global displacement crisis by rendering the concept of ‘home’ as a theological problem for politics, linking contemporary geopolitical conflict to broader issues of forced migration. For help, we engage Simone Weil's theopolitical critique of domination‐based political organising, Hannah Arendt's insights into the texture of political space and belonging, and Jodi Dean's concept of a ‘collective desire for collectivity’ to propose a lateral, connective politics of home that secures local communities while also fostering global connection. Our constructive (...) theological proposal is that the power of love for home entails the embrace of neighbour (near and far) that moves beyond the usual options of liberal cosmopolitanism, communitarian localism, and the Realpolitik of geopolitical alliances. By reconsidering and intensifying the Christian concept of neighbour‐love and linking it to the common reality of displacement and the common longing for home, we take the first steps towards illuming and unveiling a political theology of home that is neither preferential nor naively inclusive. (shrink)

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in (...) dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally. (shrink)

What are we to make of the New Christian Right’s loss of political influence and the rise of the Tea Party and libertarianism more broadly? Rather than imagine a coalition of resentment as does William E. Connolly, this paper argues that several key religious ideas of protestant fundamentalism have become secularized and now function as a political theology that privileges the personal and marginalizes the public arena. American fundamentalism shares several characteristics with protestant fundamentalism—even as it represents what might be (...) called a migration of the holy. (shrink)