Hannah Arendt and Theology

The New Yorker's Adam Kirsch recently observed that Hannah Arendt's 'scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died…' Arendt is relevant today for reasons as diverse as her rich and absorbing (and quite controversial) thought. It is a testament to the staggering breadth of Arendt's thought that her work has found a growing audience in Christian theology as well. However, her work is generating appreciation, criticism, and controversy in Christian theology: She is the faithful Augustinian on the question of evil and the betrayer of Augustine on neighbor-love; the conservative realist who can be cited in defense of the war on terror and yet the peace-loving radical democrat who seeks local forms of political action. Arendt, it appears, has become all things to all theologians. There is a need for a fuller, more integrated picture of Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt and Theology provides this picture. Concise enough to attract the curious yet comprehensive enough to interest the scholarly, this book presents Arendt in fresh perspective.

John Kiess is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland, USA. His dissertation, When War is Our Daily Bread: Congo and the Ethics of Contemporary Armed Conflict, addresses the challenges of contemporary violence through the lens of the world's deadliest conflict since WWII. He has received numerous honors and fellowships including the George J. Mitchell Scholarship, the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship, and the Evan Frankel Fellowship. John worked for several years as a community organizer in an underprivileged neighborhood in Charlottesville, VA, and has been actively involved in peacebuilding efforts in Northern Ireland, Uganda, and Congo. He and his wife live in New York City.

Introduction: Arendt between Past and Future
1. A Lover of the World: The Life and Thought of Hannah Arendt
2. Modernity as Worldlessness
3. Evil as Thoughtlessness
4. Contemplation as "Thinking What We are Doing"
5. Anthropology as Plurality
6. Politics as Natality
7. Arendt and the Future of Theology