Part One

An apocalyptic mood has seized the highest levels of global capital as the global financial system continues to implode. This implosion is but the latest financial crisis to wrack global capitalism. Financial crises are inevitable since capitalist growth has increasingly been driven by speculative bubbles such as the housing bubble in the United States. The increasingly uncontrolled financial gyrations stem from the increasing divergence between an expansive financial economy and a stagnant real economy. This “disconnect” stems from the persistent stagnationist trends in the real economy owing to overproduction or overcapacity. The search for profitability is capitalism’s driving force, and increasingly, significant…

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Part Two

The housing bubble fueled US growth, which was exceptional given the stagnation that has gripped most of the global economy in the last few years. During this period, the global economy has been marked by underinvestment and persistent tendencies toward stagnation in most key economic regions apart from the US, China, India, and a few other places. Weak growth has marked most other regions, notably Japan, which was locked until very recently into a 1.0 percent GDP growth rate, and Europe, which grew annually by 1.45 percent in the last few…

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Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:44 PM PST

Most people in our culture appear to have decided that being a Christian means inhabiting a kind of consciousness that is no longer possible for them, so they have abandoned it and rarely ever think about it. They are fortified in their rejection by the Christians they hear most about today, because they agree with their estimation of Christianity, though they draw diametrically opposite conclusions from it. Both groups believe that Christianity is emphatically committed to a specific way or ordering human relationships that was decreed by God and cannot therefore ever be changed.

Is that it, then? Christianity has already been pushed to the edges in our society as an eccentric type of consciousness that is profoundly antipathetic to contemporary values. Are we to witness its slow but inevitable death, apart from a few refugee encampments here and there?

There is another group in the game - though whether it will be sent off the field is still an open question, since it tends to be despised by both the other groups as traitorous.

This group believes that it is possible to be a Christian and post-modern, to be a member of a church and a supporter of feminism and the rights of sexual minorities in spite of Christian tradition.

It is a radical position, which has uncoupled Christianity from absolute claims about the status of the Bible and tradition.

And what broke the chain, as the traditionalists rightly foresaw, was the emancipation of women. Having embraced the ethical imperative of feminism, those of us who are members of this group came to realise that we were now reading the Bible as a human not as a divine creation.

The issue for those of us who find ourselves in this position is whether we can discover new ways of using the Christian tradition that will deepen our humanity, our care for the earth and for one another. That was the agenda I set myself in this series of lectures.

FULL ESSAY

Holloway’s other writings

Holloway’s bio

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:28 PM PST