Jesus Utopia

Scholarship on the historical Jesus and, now, on the "Jesus movement" generally divides into separate camps around two sticky questions: was Jesus an apocalyptic prophet and was the movement around him political, that is nationalistic or revolutionary? Mary Ann Beavis moves the study of the historical Jesus in a dramatic new direction as she highlights the context of ancient utopian thought and utopian communities, drawing particularly on the Essene community and Philo's discussion of the Therapeutae, and argues that only ancient utopian thought accounts for the lack of explicit political echoes in Jesus' message of the kingdom of God.

Central to the idea of a perfect society is the idea that communities must be strong and bound together with shared ideologies. However, while this may be true, rarely are the individuals that comprise a community given primacy of place as central to a strong communal theory. This volume moves away from the dominant, current macro-level theorising on the subject of identity and its relationship to and with globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual’s relationship with utopia so as to offer new interpretive approaches for engaging with and examining utopian individuality. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture, and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature.

Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian Experiments. In so doing, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique, and Utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake, we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.

This controversial book explores the presence of the fantastic in Biblical and related texts, and the influence of Biblical traditions on contemporary fantasy writing, cinema, music and art. The contributors apply a variety of critical concepts and methods from the field of fantasy studies, including the theories of Tolkien, Todorov, Rosemary Jackson and Jack Zipes, to Biblical texts and challenge theological suppositions regarding the texts which take refuge in science or historiography. Violence, Utopia and the Kingdom of God presents a provocative and arresting new analysis of Biblical texts which draws on the most recent critical approaches to provide a unique study of the Biblical narrative.

Crafting a theology of hope, this book addresses both the possibility that hope offers and the capacity of hope to respond to the challenges that life presents to us all.

Max Nettlau’s Utopian Vision gives a historically grounded presentation of the entire literature of utopianism. Nettlau shows an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. He passionately believes that the value of utopian thinking and class struggle should not be underestimated as utopian desire exists in all of us. Utopian thinking, according to Nettlau, stimulates the imagination and awakens the desire to attain a better life for everyone. Without it, human progress is impossible.