A brief overview of Marx's account of religion is followed by a consideration of a conception of liberation—a notion shared by marxists and adherents of religious traditions alike—that is substantive enough to overcome the marginalization and exploitation of countless numbers of human beings. The final section deals with the possibility of a rapprochement between the marxist and the adherent of a religious tradition.

The Emerging Church is one of the more interesting new movements in the religious landscape of the United States today. The Emerging Church has come out of US Evangelicalism, which has found itself in crisis, with a diminishing number of young people remaining in the church and a general popular impression of being intolerant, judgmental, and right-wing. Many in the Emerging Church are attempting to construct a vision of Christianity that addresses these problems. However, the Emerging Church is not a (...) monolith; it includes a variety of perspectives and positions. What I will argue in this article is that there is, among several different perspectives within the movement, a critique of the US political and economic system that provides an interesting and new way of thinking about the relationship between Christianity, politics, economics, and identity that may serve to create a challenge to the hegemonic system of the United States. For the purposes of this article I use three examples to illustrate my point: Shane Claibourne’s “New Monasticism”/”red Letter Christians” movement; Brian McLaren’s recent work, Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross The Road; and Peter Rollins as a self-proclaimed inheritor of the radical tradition. I will show that the Emerging Church thinkers, by challenging the theological constructions of US Evangelicalism, are likewise providing fodder, to varying degrees, for a critique of the US political and economic system. Whether this will coalesce into a real significant challenge or will ultimately be reabsorbed by the status quo and/or marginalized remains to be seen. (shrink)

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method (...) that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects. (shrink)

This article responds to Roland Boer’s Marxism and Theology that offers a unique contribution to understanding the current impasse in revolutionary Left politics and illustrates the importance of the numerous references to theology in Marxist literature. In this response, I focus on Boer's argument of Marxism and Judaeo-Christian theology occupying a similar contested space with respect to their uses of “political myth.” I argue that the key to Boer’s critical project is a two-pronged approach: “materializing” theology and “theologizing” historical materialism. (...) For this critical endeavor to make inroads, it relies not just on the ambivalence of political myth, but also that myths are essential to Marxist theories of emancipation, as well as to Marx’s notion of “the Aufhebung of Religion.” I focus on two figures: Ernst Bloch as a Marxist who emphasizes myth’s emancipatory qualities; and Theodor Adorno as wary of myth while adhering to the theological motif of the bilderverbot. From this analysis, we can begin to see how much Boer’s project depends on a wager on political myth itself. (shrink)

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the (...) Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticize Boer’s valorization of theology as a practical discourse that is postideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative. (shrink)