Life giving resources. Faithfully delivered.
FREE delivery on orders over £10
Serving over 2 million Christians in the UK
with Bibles, Books and Church Supplies
Our Buy-Now-Pay-Later accounts used
by over 4,000 UK Churches & Schools
Excellent 4.8 out of 5

Trustpilot

You now have 0 of this item in your basket

Weird John Brown

Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics [Hardback]

by Ted A. Smith

Author
Ted A. Smith
Book Format
Hardback
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Published
November 2014

Read full description

Click to expand

Today's Price

£50.54

Save 44%

Free UK Delivery

Available - Usually dispatched within 5 days

Buying for a school or church? Upgrade to a FREE Eden Advance Account

Enter the product quantity

Weird John Brown

Today's Price £50.54

Frequently Bought Together

Weird John Brown

by Ted A. Smith

Hardback

An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

by Stringfellow William Stringfellow

Paperback

Add both to basket for £70.98 and save £44.51

Product Description

Conventional wisdom holds that attempts to combine religion and politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade, and sacrifice need to be rooted out, the story goes, for the sake of more bounded and secular understandings of violence. Ted Smith upends this dominant view, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others to trace the ways that seemingly secular politics produce their own forms of violence without limit. He brings this argument to life - and digs deep into the American political imagination - through a string of surprising reflections on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist who took up arms against the state in the name of a higher law. Smith argues that the key to limiting violence is not its separation from religion, but its reconnection to richer and more critical modes of religious reflection. Only political theology can keep secular politics secular. A historical and theoretical intervention, Weird John Brown is also a constructive theological proposal for rethinking the nature, meaning, and exercise of violence, both human and divine.