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Shatters the common academic myth that neoliberalism is simply free market fundamentalism plus political conservatism Explains how neoliberalism is a regime of culture and values – far more than political economy Turns much of today's progressive politics upside down by showing that many of the would-be liberators are really the exploiters: as Marx and Engels declared, the 'ruling ideas' of our era must be unmasked as 'the ideas of the ruling class' Offers a vision of what might lie beyond neoliberalism Connects the analysis of neoliberalism to the cultural diagnosis of Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared 'God is dead'Neoliberalism in recent years has become the operative buzzword among pundits and academics to characterise an increasingly dysfunctional global political economy. It is often – wrongly – identified exclusively with free market fundamentalism and illiberal types of cultural conservatism. Combining penetrating argument and broad-ranging scholarship, Carl Raschke shows what the term really means, how it evolved and why it has been so misunderstood. Raschke lays out how the present new world disorder, signalled by the election of Trump and Brexit, derives less from the ascendancy of reactionary forces and more from the implosion of the post-Cold War effort to establish a progressive international moral and political order for the cynical benefit of a new cosmopolitan knowledge class, mimicking the so-called civilising mission of 19th-century European colonialists

Postmodern Theology consists in a sharp-edged retrospective and reflection on the forty-year history of the most important movement in contemporary religious thought that is only now passing from the scene. The author, Dr. Carl Raschke, is generally credited with having sparked the movement, even if he did not always happen to be its leading spokesperson. Not only has a comprehensive survey of postmodern theology in all its different phases and complexity not been published prior to the appearance of this book, but it is even more remarkable for someone who both "launched" it and had a central role in shepherding it along to offer what may be termed a "movement memoir."Postmodern Theology surveys and summarizes the major figures and trends that have given currency to such familiar expressions as "deconstruction," "deconstructive theology," "radical theology," "a/theology," "God is dead," and of course, "postmodernism" itself. Dr. Raschke also contextualizes the emergence of these catchy phrases from a frothy soup of new intellectual theories and philosophical innovations, which were international in scope but customized for both academic and popular religious writers--mainly in Britain and America--from the late 1960s onward

What is the future of theology in the midst of rapid geopolitical and economic change? Carl A. Raschke contends that two options from the last century--crisis theology and critical theory--do not provide the resources needed to address the current global crisis. Both of these perspectives remained distant from the messiness and unpredictability of life. Crisis theology spoke of the wholly other God, while critical theory spoke of universal reason. These ideas aren't tenable after postmodernism and the return of religion, which both call for a dialogical approach to God and the world. Rashke's new critical theology takes as its starting point the biblical claim that the Word became flesh--a flesh that includes the cultural, political and religious phenomena that shape contemporary existence. Drawing on recent reformulations of critical theory by Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and post-secularists such as Jürgen Habermas, Raschke introduces an agenda for theological thinking accessible to readers unfamiliar with this literature. In addition, the book explores the relationship between a new critical theology and current forms of political theology. Written with the passion of a manifesto, Critical Theology presents the critical and theological resources for thinking responsibly about the present global situation.

Religion and the semiotic revolution -- Theory and the Deus evanescens: can there truly be a "science" of religion? -- Postmodernism and the return of the "religious" -- Radical religion in the "desert of the real" -- Bataille and Altizer: the sacrificial background of postmodern religious theory -- Levinas and the final à-dieu to theology -- Deleuze and nomadology -- Žižek and the failure of the subject -- Badiou and the prospects for theory -- Conclusion: toward a revival of religious theory

Whatever happened to "sin"? The concept itself, so integral and central to the Western theological tradition, has faded away over the most recent decades and centuries as even a topic for serious contention. While perduring and persistent among Christian conservatives, especially the expansive and highly diverse global population that has come to be labelled by sociologists of religion as "evangelicalism," the term has gradually succumbed to a dearth of effective meaning and has been replaced by a variety of religiously neutral constructs, implying moral failure, psychological or behavior disorder, or political infamy. Even once trendy imaginaries as "collective sin", a redeployment of the Augustinian notion of "original sin" (peccatum originalis) favored by Reformed thinkers, while lent a socio-political tweak by Reinhold Niebuhr , has given way to various critico-theoretical adaptations, including such capacious locutions as "patriarchy" or "systemic racism." In many respects the notion of "sin" in the strict sense, rather than with attention to specific defects in either individual character or conduct, has gradually converged with the general concept of "injustice", or plain old-fashioned "wrongness."

If one blows away all the toxic miasma of American partisan politics, it becomes apparent that Donald Trump is not so much a �problem� as a symptom. Of course, the term �problem� in the context of this collection itself implies an unabashed partisan position, comparable to the present tendency for conservative talk radio hosts to decry the �problem� of the millennial generation enthusiastically embracing socialism, or the constant harping by young people, who have turned away from their evangelical upbringing, about their elders� unflagging support both for Trump himself and their condemnation of gay marriage � unless what we consider truly �problematic� is that half of a certain population sees the issue entirely different from the other. �Problematizing� Trump should run more along the lines of a physician problematizing a fever, which does not mean the kind old doctor takes the patient to task for falling ill, but rather seeks to diagnose, or trace the etiology of, the disorder itself.