Christ and Culture

Graham Ward is Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester. His previous books include Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (1995), Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (1996), The Postmodern God (Blackwell, 1997), Radical Orthodoxy (1998), The Certeau Reader (Blackwell, 1999), Cities of God (2000), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Blackwell, 2001), True Religion (Blackwell, 2002) and Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (2004).

In this book Graham Ward lifts debates about Christ and culture to an unprecedented level of sophistication and at the same time decisively moves them away from a theologically liberal ambience towards one that is genuinely orthodox and Catholic, but in a new, critical and unavoidably controversial mode. He most significantly advances our ability to tackle the question of what should be the Christian stance in the face of advanced modernity. John Milbank, University of NottinghamGraham Ward has always written insightful and arresting theology, but in this book he exposits scripture, retrieves tradition and interrogates culture with a yet more brilliant and surer touch than ever before. His concern is with the cultural mediation of the Mediator, Jesus Christ, who, in the endless displacements of his body, is not so much an identity to be known as an operation, a movement, in which to participate. This book is about the ‘first born’ of creation, the one by, for and in whom we live, the ‘culture’ by which we are given to be. Ward’s transcorporeal Christology challenges our secular certainties and finds for us the promise of the transcendent in the textual—and indeed sexual—negotiations of our always encultured bodies. This is wonderfully mesmeric, bravura theology. Gerard Loughlin, University of Durham "New book attempts to break out of the Christian insularity to produce a genuinely public theology of significant interest to postmodern philosophers and social theorists."Modern Theology

• Acknowledgements ixIntroduction 1Part One THE ECONOMY OF RESPONSE 271 Christology and Mimesis 292 The Schizoid Christ 603 The Body of the Church and its Erotic Politics 92Part Two ENGENDERING CHRIST 1114 Redemption: Between Reception and Response 1135 Divinity and Sexual Difference 1296 The Politics of Christ's Circumcision (and the Mystery of all Flesh) 159Part Three THE LIVING CHRIST: ECONOMIES OF REDEMPTION 1817 Allegoria Amoris: A Christian Ethics 1838 Spiritual Exercises: A Christian Pedagogy 2199 Suffering and Incarnation: A Christian Politics 248Index 267