Power can be legitimate and necessary, but it can also be oppressive. The Powers without any masters create their own structures, which cannot any longer easily be tamed. What about for example globalization, does it create rather than prevent conflicts? Is there really an invisible godlike hand managing the economy? How can Christian interpretations of life analyze and transform the invisible driving forces underlying globalization?Religion can offer legitimations as well as crucial criticisms of power constellations. This book departs from the insight that religious traditions can develop a countervailing power to cultural and social constructions. Religious contributions to political challenges are not only protesting, but also providing fruitful alternatives to the anonymous powers. The power and influence of religion itself seems to decrease and increase at the same time. The institutional church has lost its national power on the one side, while people tend to be more and more interested in spirituality on the other side. Religion functions in new ways today. This is also the case within faith communities, which are are revisioning their identities and power relations in late modernity.The authors of this anthology invite their readers to approach the phenomena of power from different angles. Among the manifold cases investigated the reader will find non-voluntary childlessness, the power of the instantaneous and visual culture. Furthermore, the understandings of power presented by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucalut, Vaclav Havel, Sor Juana, Krysztof Kieslowski and Maw Weber are analyzed. A central problem investigated by all authors is how to relate autonomy and heteronomy to each other in a new way.The book has been produced by scholars of Theology and Religious Studies, cooperating in The Nordic Network of Contextual Theology, founded 1991 and gathering more than 50 scholars from all Nordic countries.
Distrubution: Tapir akademisk forlag, http://www.tapirforlag.no