Contracts and Character

I’ve run across a few passages from novels relevant to the last Milbank chapter reviewed here – dealing with the shift in our mode of dealing with one another from character and virtue – adherence to an external standard – to contracts founded on self-defined self-interests.
First, from Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, as [...]

Read Full Post »

Theology and Social Theory, Ch. 2

Milbank’s second chapter is entitled ‘Political Economy as Theodicy and Agonistics’. Where the ‘New Science of Politics’ dealt with the origins of a secular space for power relations, political economy was more interested in how the mechanisms of power functioned. Crucially, its theory centered on the regular, unintended harmony of these mechanisms, in [...]

Read Full Post »

Theology and Social Theory, Ch. 1

Jonathan’s post on Chapter 1 of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory is posted here, and my response is in the comments.  As before, I also reproduce his post and my reply below.
He writes:
In Milbank’s first chapter, he constructs a genealogy of the secular by narrating the course of its development from the thirteenth century, in [...]

Read Full Post »

Theology and Social Theory, Introduction

In the introduction to Theology and Social Theory Milbank addresses his book to theologians and social theorists.  To social theorists Milbank intends to demonstrate that the governing assumptions of modern, secular social theory are at variance with orthodox Christian positions, and moreover that they are not more rational than those positions.  To theologians he offers [...]

Read Full Post »

Theology and Social Theory, Preface to the 2d. Ed.

Jonathan and I have recently decided to read through John Milbank’s seminal work of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, Theology and Social Theory.  As Jonathan writes,
Because of the extremely turgid prose that RO elects to use (it remains unclear to me why cultural studies/social theory and the theological reflection that employs these disciplines insist upon neologism [...]

Read Full Post »

Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

‘”I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.”‘

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

‘To die for any old invisible other is the very reverse of valuing otherness, because otherness must involve not just [...]

Read Full Post »