Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed - Paperback

by Karen Bray (Author)

"This is a book about what it would mean to be a bit moody in the midst of being theological and political. Its framing assumption is that neoliberal economics relies on narratives in which not being in the right mood means a cursed existence." So begins Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, which mounts a challenge to neoliberal narratives of redemption. Mapping the contemporary state of political theology, Karen Bray brings it to bear upon secularism, Marxist thought, affect theory, queer temporality, and other critical modes as a way to refuse separating one's personal mood from the political or philosophical. Introducing the concept of bipolar time, she offers a critique of neoliberal temporality by countering capitalist priorities of efficiency through the experiences of mania and depression. And it is here Bray makes her crucial critical turn, one that values the power of those who are unredeemed in the eyes of liberal democracy--those too slow, too mad, too depressed to be of productive worth--suggesting forms of utopia in the poetics of crip theory and ordinary habit. Through performances of what she calls grave attending--being brought down by the gravity of what is and listening to the ghosts of what might have been--Bray asks readers to choose collective care over individual overcoming.

Author Biography

Karen Bray is Assistant Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Wesleyan College. She is co-editor (with Stephen D. Moore) of Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies, also published by Fordham University Press.