This book is sub-titled “The Refusal to Cease Suffering”. That is a stunning concept. When you compare it to the book I reviewed earlier this morning, that saw suffering as something to be avoided, it becomes evident that there are very different approaches to theology and wealth. Bell is writing from the underside of the history that Francis Fukuyama declared finished in 1990. Tanner is writing as a Yale professor. Bell’s book is written in deep and attentive dialogue with the liberation theologians of South America. Tanner’s book is written in thrall to technology and the power of capital.
I have read few books as invigorating as this one. And what is depressing is that it put shape on the set of ideas I thought I would research in my doctorate. But what is encouraging is that I can stand on the shoulders of giants like Bell and maybe contribute something towards a liberation theology for Ireland. This is the amazing paragraph that I most sincerely appreciated:
Therefore, only a more substantive ecclesiology, one that begins by collapsing the distinction between the theological and the social, between religion and politics, stands a chance of resisting capitalist discipline. This ecclesiology must reclaim the theological as a material, that is, as a fully social, political and economic reality. This ecclesiology will recognize the practice of faith as intrinsically – instead of derivatively – social, political, economic. It will begin by conceiving of Christianity not as the apolitical custodian of abstract moral values like “love” that have to be translated into politics but, rather, as a social, political, economic formation (an ensemble of technologies of desire) vying with other formations (technologies of desire) on a single field of lived experience. It will start with the recognition that the Christian mythos finds its political correlate, not in the state – even one ordered toward the common good – but in the Church as the exemplary form of human community. This is to say, it begins with the recovery of the Augustinian insight that politics as statecraft is but a secular parody of the true politics that is the fellowship of the saints.
– Daniel M. Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, p. 72.
In the next two weeks, Daniel Bell will be publishing what I suppose might be a sort of sequel, which further interrogates the way our desires are shaped and formed by capitalism. I look forward to it almost as much as I look forward to Justin Cronin’s second book in the Passage series.
A simply outstanding book.
Your Correspondent, Is “about the work of liberating desire from the clutches of capitalism”
Volf wrote a quite critical review of this book (Modern Theology, April 2003), which led to a little back-and-forth with Bell. As a lover of this book, what do you make of Volf’s criticisms? Helpful or misguided?
Also, I read this sentence in MacIntyre’s history of ethics and thought of you:
“the history of Calvinism is the history of the progressive realization of the autonomy of the economic.”
Is this a wild mischaracterisation or something approximating the truth?
So basically, I’m asking you to write your PhD dissertation in a blog comment. Go!
Thanks for the heads-up. I read the exchange yesterday. Very interesting. Volf’s movement from Exclusion and Embrace is disappointing. But he makes strong points. I also just received Bell’s new book in the post yesterday but have to get through a Hauerwas book, Leithart’s Defending Constantine and actual college reading before I can get into it.
I might blog about the exchange between Bell and Volf at some point though.
MacIntyre has an ongoing bias against Calvinism. This is a typical generalisation that he makes about the Geneva-reformation. He would never be so sloppy about, well, anything else. But there is more than a nugget of truth to it. So it is a wild mischaracterisation of an approximate truth. 🙂
My PhD (if it happens) is about Christian theology, not this Calvinism thing you speak of. 🙂