Dr Ward Blanton, Reader in Biblical Cultures and European Thought in the Department of Religious Studies, has just co-authored a new book, An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics (Columbia University Press, 2016), alongside Clayton Crockett (University of Central Arkansas), Jeffrey W Robbins (Lebanon Valley College) and Noelle Vahanian (Lebanon Valley College).
An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger’s philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics ‘after’ God.
For more details, please see the publisher’s page here:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-insurrectionist-manifesto/9780231176231