Remaking Humanity: Embodiment and Hope in Catholic Theology

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Drawing upon Edward Schillebeeckxs theology and Judith Butlers philosophy, Adam Beyt uses the framework of nonviolent hope to construct a Catholic political theology responding to dehumanizing violence. Dehumanizing violence names words, institutions, or acts violating the inherent dignity of being made in the image and likeness of God. Theology can participate in dehumanizing violence by claiming an uninterrogated universality that marginalizes bodies due to their perceived differences such as gender, race, sexuality, or ability.

The books constructive project integrates Schillebeeckxs and Butlers thought with queer theory and phenomenology to model embodiment as an enfleshing dynamism between bodies and signification. The text then posits Catholic discipleship as incarnating hope by defending the humanum, the new humanity announced through Gods Reign. Combining reflections from Schillebeeckx and Butler, this hope centers discipleship as nonviolent world building. Concluding with a sustained reflection with the writings of Franz Fanon and Walter Benjamin, the final chapter sketches a Catholic solidaristic response to contemporary struggles against the necropolitics of colonizing and state violence through assemblies of hope.

Reviews

Adam Beyts Remaking Humanity expresses the ontological vulnerability of embodied existence in a sacramental mode. This is both a provocative and constructive proposal for a theology that takes the experience of having and being a body seriouslyincluding all of the dynamism, instability, and vulnerability that this entails. With the work of Edward Schillebeeckx as a starting point, Beyt builds from thinkers like Bulter, Merleau-Ponty, and Mbembe in pursuit of a mystical political practice involving the whole person. This book is a Thomistically grounded work of political theology that is steeped in the sacramental imagination, allowing it to run through doors pushed open by Schillebeeckx and earlier generations of scholars. Beyt imagines incarnating hope in a way that expands the borders of the Rule of God beyond polarized binaries, exclusions, and inherited structures of violence. * Daniel Minch, University of Mnster, Germany *
Beyts Remaking Humanity prompts a serious rethinking of any Catholic theological anthropology by juxtaposing a violence latent at the heart of a theology of the body with a phenomenology of embodiment that strives to recognize the politics of marginalization always at work in theological discourses. By reading the Incarnation with Judith Butler and locating assemblies of hope with Fanon and Mbembe, Beyt presents us with a nothing less than a detailed roadmap for an experience of grace that resonates deeply with the complex and multifaceted bodies that we actually inhabit in our everyday lives. * Colby Dickinson, Loyola University, USA *

Author Bio

Adam Beyt is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Norbert College, USA.