Event: Evangelicals and Empire

Hey Everyone,

This Wednesday will be a very interesting gathering in Wheaton about evangelicals and empire. It is hosted by Bruce Benson and Peter Heltzel, some good friends of mine. Please check it out.

Evangelicals and Empire

Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 7:30 PM
Kresge Room, Edmond Chapel
featuring authors of Evangelicals and Empire

Dr. Benson: "Evangelicalism: The Contested Church."

Dr. Heltzel: "Hope Against Hope: Prophetic Black Evangelicalism from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Barack Obama."

Bruce Ellis Benson is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Wheaton College (IL). He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry and Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. He is co-editor of The Phenomenology of Prayer, Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love's Wisdom, and Evangelicals and Empire. His areas of research include continental philosophy of religion, Nietzsche, and political theology.

Peter Goodwin Heltzel is Assistant Professor of Theology at New York Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he holds theological degrees from Wheaton College (BA), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and Boston University (Ph.D.). He is a Co-Founder of New York Faith and Justice and the Envision Conference. His book Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics will be out this Spring with Yale University Press. Edited volumes include Theology in Global Context (T&T Clark, 2004) and The Chalice Introduction to Disciples Theology (Chalice Press, 2008). He lives in New York City with his wife Sarah who is an opera singer

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Evangelicals and Empire

Edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel

This groundbreaking collection considers empire from a global perspective, exploring the role of evangelicals in political, social, and economic engagement at a time when empire is alternately denounced and embraced. It brings noted thinkers from a range of evangelical perspectives together to engage the most explosive and discussed theorists of empire in the first decade of the twenty-first century--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Using their work as a springboard, the contributors grapple with the concept of empire and how evangelicalism should operate in the world of empire.

Contributors to the volume include Jim Wallis
Helene Slessarev-Jamir, James K. A. Smith, John Milbank, Donald W. Dayton,
Mark Lewis Taylor, Amos Yong, Michael S. Horton, John Franke and Catherine Keller.

"Powerful, urgent, and rigorous. Evangelicals and Empire's diverse voices combine solid scholarship and moral passion to produce a challenging rethinking of what it means to be evangelical."--Ronald J. Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action

"Evangelicals and Empire is a significant book because it deals with religious groups that are usually identified with the politics of empire. Helping the reader understand the deeper reasons for the connection of empire and religion, the essays in this book come together to provide a truly invaluable resource for our time as they flesh out alternative resources that resist empire within the evangelical traditions. The future belongs to such efforts that seek to identify new horizons for the interplay of religion and politics."--Joerg Rieger, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University