Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to ”Radical Orthodoxy”

Modernity and postmodernity are intensely contested interpretive spaces. In a time, or mood, that many in the industrialized world consider to be postmodern, what should the contribution of Christian theology be? What are its chances, its challenges, its hopes and limits? This volume represents a collection of approaches by various authors whose work engages the contemporary theological space-modern, postmodern, and otherwise - in ways that are in critical conversation with radical orthodoxy, but suggesting alternative approaches and readings. claims about postmodern space, in ways that aim to acknowledge the importance of the questions and critiques raised by Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, and others, but that proposes different responses to issue crucial to contemporary theological discourse such as: the difficulty to engage the powerful critiques offered by radical orthodoxy, while resisting the totality of vision and approach, the struggle for justice against poverty and predatory capitalism, theologies of incarnation, theological gender constructions, participation and presence in the eucharistic liturgy, narrative legitimacy through periodization, the radical nature of ethnic and cultural Otherness, reciprocity and redemption, immanence and transcendence, feminist philosophy of religion, a Jewish feminist re-enchantment of the world, theological eurocentrism, theologies of gift and economic exchange, and constructive theology.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is the author of numerous works including New Woman, New Earth, Gaia and God, and Women and Redemption. She is the editor (with Rosemary Keller) of In Our Own Voices and Women Healing Earth. She lives in Evanston, IL. Marion Grau is Associate Professor of Theology at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a member school of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.