In the face of apparently rampant individualism, there has been a steady call for a return to community and tradition, particularly in religious communities and in recent Christian theology and ethics. The form of contemporary life upheld by modern ideals like freedom and universalism, the story goes, turns out to divide people from each other and from the communal sources of our traditionally moral values. But the call to community too often confuses individualism with individuality, assuming that any appeal to individuality as a value or ideal is a rejection of communal goods, rather than a...

Do those in authority wield all the power, or do those who stand before and under authority also exercise power? What kinds of power are available to us? How must we reconfigure how conceptions of authority once we recognize the multiple and various forms that power takes? In this volume, established and rising scholars in theology and ethics respond to these questions in order to revitalize the discipline of political theology. While traditional and recent approaches to political theology focus on issues of sovereignty and presume specific analogies between the divine and the human, the...