Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was Professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. A sociologist, historian, and Protestant lay theologian, Ellul is primarily known for his writings on technology, propaganda, and Christian anarchism. He influenced a wide array of thinkers including Ivan Illich, William Stringfellow, Thomas Merton, Paul Virilio, and Neil Postman. In this book, Jacob Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison guide readers through Ellul's most influential theological and sociological writings. By understanding Ellul's primary works, readers will be able to clearly grasp his social theory and theological ethics, profiting from his deep insight and prophetic wisdom.
Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was Professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. A sociologist, historian, and Protestant lay theologian, Ellul is primarily known for his writings on technology, propaganda, and Christian anarchism. He influenced a wide array of thinkers including Ivan Illich, William Stringfellow, Thomas Merton, Paul Virilio, and Neil Postman. In this book, Jacob Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison guide readers through Ellul's most influential theological and sociological writings. By understanding Ellul's primary works, readers will be able to clearly grasp his social theory and theological ethics, profiting from his deep insight and prophetic wisdom.
This book presents an original and dynamic reading of the twentieth-century French sociologist and theological ethicist Jacques Ellul. Adopting Ellul’s use of ‘presence’ as a hermeneutical key to understanding his work, it examines the origins of Ellul’s approach to presence in his readings of Kierkegaard and the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, highlights the central structural role of presence in Ellul’s theological ethics, and elucidates a crucial turning point in Ellul’s theology following a personal crisis in Ellul’s faith and life. Drawing from numerous unpublished and untranslated texts, Jacob Marques Rollison argues that this crisis involves confrontation with a critique of presence manifest in Ellul’s reading of and engagement with Michel Foucault. Marques Rollison distills Ellul’s sociological critiques and theological responses to this crisis, presenting Ellul’s evolving theology against the background of major shifts in French intellectual life. In doing so, the author simultaneously calls for renewed engagement with Ellul’s prophetic thought, critically appraises Ellul’s dialectical theology and Marxist inheritances, and develops a robustly Protestant approach to theological communication ethics for our time.
A New Reading of Jacques Ellul argues for presence as a hermeneutical key to understanding the origins and evolution of Ellul's theological ethics. Highlighting Ellul's engagement with Michel Foucault, this book offers a constructive proposal for a robustly Protestant theological communication ethics.
There has never been a book provoking more delirium, foolishness and irrational movements, without any relationship to Jesus Christ [than the Book of Revelation]." --Jacques Ellul, Introduction Known for his trenchant critique of modernity and of those Christians who celebrate their captivity to it, Ellul here cuts to the heart of the theological intention of the Book of Revelation, and thereby reveals the liberating gospel in all its offensiveness. Neither an exhaustive commentary nor a work of historical-exegetical analysis, Apocalypse is a provocative, independent interpretation. Ellul seeks to rescue Revelation from the reassuring and orthodox banality to which commentators often reduce it. The goal is to perceive the totality of the book in its movement and structure. "Architecture in movement" is the key to understanding Revelation's puzzling but simple message. This edition also comes with a new foreword by Jacob Marques Rollison who provides an essential aid for guiding readers through Ellul's thorough engagement with Revelation.
How are we to understand ourselves today? In the increasingly technological late post-modernity of the 21st-century West, some of the most cherished words in our collective heritage-freedom, humanity, truth-are some of the most violently abused and questioned. Can we carry them forward? Alternatively, can we do without them? And what is at stake in language itself? Does it still have any significance in our rapidly changing world? Revolution of Necessity examines these and other questions by probing the works of two great thinkers of recent times: the French polymath, sociologist, and theologian Jacques Ellul and the globally recognized Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj i ek. What results is a dynamic dialogue questioning ideology, revolution, subjectivity, and our understanding of ourselves in the world, culminating in a rousing round of symbolic wagering on the linguistic question. "Rollison has written a thoroughly thoughtful, absorbing, and relevant work. By deeply engaging in the subversive thought of Jacques Ellul and Slavoj i ek, Rollison casts light on the porous nature of language while simultaneously challenging us to re-think the symbolic efficiency of language and how it affects our understanding of the self and the other." -Jacob Van Vleet, Author of Dialectical Theology and Jacques Ellul "Jacob Rollison has done us a service in this creative volume. By bringing Slavoj i ek into an unexpected dialogue with Jacques Ellul, he has made a case for renewed engagement with Ellul and cast fresh light on the perennial questions that motivate i ek's frenetic contemporary interventions. More than that, though, Rollison's study counts as an exploration of the complex dialectics-between contingency and necessity, word and act, mechanism and subjectivity-that drive both thinkers' projects." -Adam Kotsko, author of i ek and Theology
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