Foucault and Theology

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Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate "the church as politics" within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy.

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Foucault and Theology is valuable as a serious attempt to come to terms with the implications for theological thinking of Foucault's later concerns with biopower and care of the self. And the book not only points to a new theological approach to Foucault, but points to significant possibilities of contem-porary Christian practices of the self, which take as their point of departure Foucault's analysis of worldly power. * Foucault Studies, No. 14, September 2012 *

Author Bio

Jonathan Tran is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. His book Theology and the Vietnam War: History, Memory, and Redemption is forthcoming in the Blackwell series "Challenges in Contemporary Theology"