The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World

Princeton's Mark Lewis Taylor has always worked at the intersection of the political and theological. Now, in this intense and exciting work, he explores in a systematic way how those two dimensions of human reality can be conceived anew and together.

Taylor argues that the decline of political discourse, the justification of torture and preemptive war, mass incarceration, the misuse of religion to justify atrocity, and most especially the sheer weight of suffering in the world—all these developments urge us to reconceive theology itself.

In conjunction with the latest insights of political theory, decolonial thought, and spectral theories in contemporary philosophy, Taylor suggests that the political is the context of the theological and a realm in which we can discern, beyond simple categories of transcendence and immanence, a transimmanence that is theologically illuminative and politically liberating.