Liturgical power : between economic and political theology / Nicholas Heron.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heron, Nicholas, author.

Series:

Commonalities

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Christianity and politics.

Church and state.

Political theology.

Physical Description:

205 pages ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon that must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call "administration," but which the ancients termed "economics." The book's principal aim is thus genealogical: It seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity. This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power-an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy, understood in the broad sense as "public service." Whereas until now only liturgy's acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service. Book jacket.

Contents:

The economic God

Liturgical power

The practice of hierarchy

Instrumental cause

Anthropology of office.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823278688

0823278689

9780823278695

0823278697

OCLC:

1004981636