Cascade Books launches new series: Theopolitical Visions

September 25, 2007

By: Cascade Books

Theopolitical Visions

Series Editors: D. Stephen Long, Thomas Heilke, and C.C. Pecknold

THEOPOLITICAL VISIONS seeks to open up new vistas on public life, hosting fresh conversations between theology and political theory. This series assembles writers who wish to revive theopolitical imagination for the sake of our common good.

The divorce between theology and politics wrought in modernity appears to have outlived its usefulness. The "perpetual peace" of the secular orders, prescribed as an antidote to the so-called "wars of religion," proved to have its own totalizing, disciplinary, and violent tendencies. But if the marriage of theology and politics in Christendom was always tenuous, it is the divorce that appears to be on the rocks in modernity. What is needed now is not a retreat to the past, but a revival of an ancient conversation between theology and politics so that a different future might be imagined.

THEOPOLITICAL VISIONS hopes to re-source modern imaginations with those ancient traditions in which political theorists were often also theologians. Whether it was Jeremiah's prophetic vision of exiles "seeking the peace of the city," Plato's illuminations on piety and the civic virtues in the Republic, St. Paul's call to "a common life worthy of the Gospel," St. Augustine's beatific vision of the City of God, or the gothic heights of medieval political theology, much of Western thought has found it necessary to think theologically about politics, and to think politically about theology. This series is founded in the hope that the renewal of such mutual illumination might make a genuine contribution to the peace of our cities.

The first volume in the THEOPOLITICAL VISIONS series (available Fall 2007) is entitled Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, by Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles.

For more information about the series, contact our editor for theology and ethics, charlie*a*wipfandstock.com">Charlie Collier.

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