Steven G. Ogden, Violence, Entitlement, and Politics. A Theology on Transforming the Subject, Routledge. Forthcoming September 30, 2021
Book Description
This book is an exercise in political theology, exploring the problem of gender-based violence by focusing on violent male subjects and the issue of entitlement. It addresses gender-based violence in familial and military settings before engaging with a wider political context. The chapters draw on sources ranging from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Étienne Balibar to Rowan Williams and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Entitlement is theorized and interpreted as a gender pattern, predisposing subjects toward controlling behaviour and/or violent actions. Steven Ogden develops a theology of transformation, stressing immanence. He examines entitled subjects, predisposed to violence, where transformation requires a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself. The book also reflects on today’s pervasive strongman politics, where political rationalities foster proprietorial thinking and entitlement gender patterns, and how theology is called to develop counter-discourses and counter-practices.
Table of Contents
1 The problem of gender-based violence
2 Theorizing violence, entitlement, and strongman politics
3 Entitlement predisposing subjects toward controlling behaviour and violent actions
4 Diverging trajectories: From Foucault and confession to transformation
5 A theology of transformation
6 Transforming the subject
7 6 January 2021: An epiphany of entitlement and the promise of transformation
Author
Steven G. Ogden is an adjunct Lecturer in Theology, and Research Fellow of the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia, and formerly Dean of St Peter’s Cathedral Adelaide, and Principal St Francis Theological College Brisbane. His publications include The Church, Authority and Foucault: Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom (2017) and The Presence of God in the World: A Contribution to Postmodern Christology based on the Theologies of Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner (2007).
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