The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, Second Edition

Mark Lewis Taylor

Nov 2015 · Fortress Press

About this ebook

The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor’s award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of “Lockdown America” and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a “theatrics of state terror,” Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the US a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a “counter-theatrics to state terror,” a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples’ movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms “a liberating material spirituality” to unseat the state that kills.    

About the author

Mark Lewis Taylor is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Among his numerous books are The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Fortress Press 2011), Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers in American Empire (Fortress Press 2005), and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (2005).