Rating: 
Summary: Beyond liberation theology
Review: A life-changing book in my development as a convert to Catholicism. Few have ever demonstrated the inherent relevance of the Eucharist in the arena of "worldly" power politics. Cavanaugh revealed to me how Catholics need not look so much outside of doctrinal orthodoxy for a response to secular evils. Rather the transformative power of the Eucharist and the Liturgy is ever yet to be discovered, not just as succor for the soul but also for the nations.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond liberation theology
Review: A life-changing book in my development as a convert to Catholicism. Few have ever demonstrated the inherent relevance of the Eucharist in the arena of "worldly" power politics. Cavanaugh revealed to me how Catholics need not look so much outside of doctrinal orthodoxy for a response to secular evils. Rather the transformative power of the Eucharist and the Liturgy is ever yet to be discovered, not just as succor for the soul but also for the nations.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond liberation theology
Review: A life-changing book in my development as a convert to Catholicism. Few have ever demonstrated the inherent relevance of the Eucharist in the arena of "worldly" power politics. Cavanaugh revealed to me how Catholics need not look so much outside of doctrinal orthodoxy for a response to secular evils. Rather the transformative power of the Eucharist and the Liturgy is ever yet to be discovered, not just as succor for the soul but also for the nations.
Rating:
Summary: Profound analysis of the church's true role in society.
Review: A profound and moving account of the Chilean church's learning to become incarnate among the oppressed and tortured, rather than aiming at being the (disembodied) "soul" of Chilean society. " A brilliant essay in political microstrategy and theology at once, this book should be required reading at seminaries across the U.S. Not to be missed!
Rating:
Summary: True theology, true politics
Review: Cavanaugh brings together seemingly disparate rituals - torture and eucharist - and through a illuminating dialogical engagement between them reveals the radical political implications of Christian liturgy. In this he exposes what authentic theology must proclaim and what the true political life of the Church must be. This book is a must read!
Rating:
Summary: a book as excellent as its title is provocative
Review: Cavanaugh starts from the premise that 'torture is not a merely physical assault on bodies but a formation of a social imagination'--the vision that organizes the members of a group. On the one hand, Christianity has the Eucharist as its way to form the 'social imagination' for true community; on the other, the modern state (especially in its more totalitarian extremes, but even in its more tolerant, liberal exemplars) has the effective tool of torture as 'a kind of perverted liturgy', forming its members into 'an atomized aggregate of mutually supicious individuals'.Hence the title, and Cavanaugh's intention 'to display a kind of Eucharistic counter-politics which forms the church into a body capable of resisting oppression'--an alternative to the violence so rampant in the world today. For Cavanaugh, the Body of Christ stands as the only genuine alternative, and torture-as-liturgy can be instructive (a sort of diabolical mirror) for building up the Body of Christ. The best thing about this book is the way it kneads an astute, truly orthodox theology into the mass of the day-to-day politics of Pinochet's Chile. Cavanaugh not only illuminates unflinchingly many of the horrors of that place and time, but opens up fertile perspectives for the whole church on Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology, areas long hide-bound by a certain naive obliviousness to politics and the narratives of living faith. Few works of academically rigorous theology interrogate one's hopes, dreams and desires as deeply as this one does. One comes away from the reading with a sense of caution, a much more sophisticated political perspective on both ecclesiology and Eucharist, and a new flame in the heart.
Rating:
Summary: All Belongs to God
Review: Cavanaugh's book shows what Radical Orthodoxy is all about--he traces some of the myths that drive Western nation-states to medieval theological hiccups; he delves the resources of Christian liturgy for strength to resist the all-envious nation-state; he points to times and places that the Church has really "gotten it right" and taken a stand against the idols and empires in the name of Christian charity.
Best of all, Cavanaugh does it in such a manner that a reader who has trouble with John Milbank's dizzying syntax (and I are one) can make it though his book without having to read each paragraph three times.
For people who suspect that neocon political ideology is more sinister than we've been led to think, and for people who believe that the Peace of Christ is neither utopian dream nor otherworldly sigh but practices through which the gracious Father of the universe, incarnated in the Son and empowering peaceable communities through the Spirit, can redeem, even if incompletely, the world which God so loves.
Rating:
Summary: Pragmatic Ecclesialogy has visted us.
Review: This book is nothing short of excellent. In theological circles the question of the role of the church in the world has been beaten to death. Cavanaugh brings the question back to life in his book. Yet, he, unlike his predecessors, has coupled his theology with good proof of it's pragmatic importance in the real life scenario of Pinochet's Chile. Where the church suffering from Maritainian theology and oppresion by the state was able to move beyond the presuppossed "mystical" realm into the world where they were able to resist the state by refusing to give over their members to victimization. Cavanaugh contends that the proper unity that the Eucharist provides gives the church the ability to move into the real world and have their own "politics" that fights injustice and stands for the opressed. A timely book that outlines an increasingly helpful view of the role of the church in a world that wishes to wreak havoc upon her.
Rating:
Summary: Pragmatic Ecclesialogy has visted us.
Review: This book is nothing short of excellent. In theological circles the question of the role of the church in the world has been beaten to death. Cavanaugh brings the question back to life in his book. Yet, he, unlike his predecessors, has coupled his theology with good proof of it's pragmatic importance in the real life scenario of Pinochet's Chile. Where the church suffering from Maritainian theology and oppresion by the state was able to move beyond the presuppossed "mystical" realm into the world where they were able to resist the state by refusing to give over their members to victimization. Cavanaugh contends that the proper unity that the Eucharist provides gives the church the ability to move into the real world and have their own "politics" that fights injustice and stands for the opressed. A timely book that outlines an increasingly helpful view of the role of the church in a world that wishes to wreak havoc upon her.
Rating:
Summary: Radical Ecclesial Politics
Review: This book is nothing short of groundbreaking. William T. Cavanaugh offers a lucid and provactive study of the social practice of torture and shows masterfully how the church's practice of the Eucharist forms the church into a counter-politics capable of resisting the totalizing aims of the state. The first section of the book deals with an analysis of the practice of torture itself. Cavanaugh shows how torture is not simply (or even primarilty) an attack on individuals or a form of interrogation, but an attack on bodies, social bodies. The state, through utilizing torture as a means to atomize and isolate individuals, fragments all other social bodies so as to prevent any serious resistance to the regime. Torture, then is primarily social in nature, that is designed to counter all forms of social grouping that the state percieves as a danger. In the second section, Cavanaugh discusses the situation of the church in Chile under General Pinochet to show how these practices of torture were put into place and how the new-Christendom ecclesiology of French catholic thinkers, parituclarly Maritian set the stage for the church to be ill-prepared for this crisis. The dominant ecclesiology of the time was a dualism in which the church was the "soul" of society and the state the "body." Therefore, the church could not be seen as a social body that could ever stand against the state in any significant way. Cavanaugh shows how toward the last years of the Pinochet regime, the church began to shed this ecclesiology and move toward one more capable of resistance to the regime which resulted in movements like teh Vicarate of Solidarity. In the final section of the book, Cavanaugh moves into a discussion of the eucharist as a means of the church to sustaian a counter-imagination and a counter-politics to that of the toatlaizing state. Through the celebration of th Eucharaist, Christ's body and blood, tortured to death for us bind us together as a social body - the body of Christ - and redefine the bonds of loyalty that person adheres to. The church, rather than the tribalistic state becomes the dominant social body. Through the eucharist we are fellow-citizens, not with other Chileans (or Americans), but with other members of the church. This provided the framework for the church to be a social body capable of offering an alternative to the violence of the state, who seeks to atomize and dissect all other social groups. Through the eucharist, the church "re-members" itself as the body of Christ and ignites the eschatological imagination that allows them to ressit the false notions of truth that are forced upon them by the dominant regime. One of the most insightful elements in this book is Cavanaugh's discussion of time. So often in Chrisian treatments of church and state issues, we are accustomed to speaking in terms of spheres. The sphere of the church as distinct from the sphere of the state. However, Cavanaugh resituates the discussion in terms of temporality rather than spaciality. This puts a whole new perspective on how we as Christians should view our participation in the state system. The tension is not between two spheres of creation, but between the old age and the new age brought about in Christ. This speaks against the Lutheran two kingdoms model or even the Barthian one kingdom, two spheres model. The issue is not what sphere we are in, but what timeframe we live in light of. The implications of this are many and I can't wait to read Cavanaugh's new book "Theopolitical Imagination" which I think will touch on this theme further. The only area of criticism that I have on this book is that I find the practices discussed therein (torture and eucharist) to be a bit narrow. What I mean is that torture is but a subset of the wider forms of violence that the state utilizes to atomize and fragment social groups. Likewise, the Eucharist is but one of the forms of resistance that the church has against such efforts on the part of the state (formost among the others would be the interpretation and performance of Scripture). Thus, while Cavanaugh's discussion is extremely lucid and cogent, I find that this work only looks at two foci within a larger context of issues at hand. The posture of the state's domination system is multivalent and so also are the church's forms of resistance. Explorations in this area would be fascinating and I hope others pick up on this idea. But, in the final analysis, this is a groundbreaking and amazing book that wil doubtless become a household name in contemporary contributions to ecclesiology and liberation theology.
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