Although Foucault's lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics promised to treat the theme of biopolitics, the course deals at length with neoliberalism while mentioning biopolitics hardly at all. Some scholars account for this elision by claiming that Foucault sympathized with neoliberalism; I argue on the contrary that Foucault develops a penetrating critique of the neoliberal claim to preserve individual liberty. Following Foucault, I show that the Chicago economist Gary Becker exemplifies what Foucault describes elsewhere as biopolitics: a form of power applied to the behavior of a population through the normalizing use of statistics. Although Becker's preference for indirect intervention might seem to preserve the independence of individuals, under biopolitics individual liberty is itself the means by which populations are governed indirectly. In my view, by describing the history and ambivalence of neoliberal biopolitics, Foucault fosters a critical vigilance that is the precondition for creative political resistance.

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Giorgio Agamben argues that Christian thought provides the paradigm of modern governmental power, which reinforces mundane government by investing it with glory. Agamben claims that Dionysius the Areopagite exemplifies this structure; in his view, Dionysian negative theology serves to sacralize ecclesiastical power. In response, I argue that Dionysius desacralizes every authority, affirming that some things are sacred even as he subjects that affirmation to thoroughgoing critique. Against both dogmatic adherence and pure profanation, Dionysius models a politics that draws on the power of the sacred while holding it open to unpredictable development.

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Something happened to me as I was meditating on this book something for which, relying on the gift of God, I am made more bold to write.Gianni Vattimo enthusiastically proclaims the advent of the postmodern, which he believes holds the prospect of transformation from an authoritarian past into a new age of freedom. 1 Vattimo claims that the overcoming of metaphysics enables the recovery of Christian faith, albeit a faith now purged of literalism and hierarchy. In order to articulate this postmodern religiosity, Vattimo depends upon the medieval abbot Joachim of Fiore, harnessing Joachim's spiritual interpretation of scripture and his view of history as progress towards the age of the Spirit in support of his own vision for a Christianity without dogma. Vattimo writes, 'Joachim of Fiore offers us a model for living postmodern religious experience on the basis of the specific content of his teaching on the age of the Spirit and of his general theological tendency to understand salvation history as the story of the transformation in which the Scripture's meaning is spiritualized.' 2 Unfortunately, as I shall argue, he misconstrues Joachim on both counts. In the tumultuous twelfth century Joachim predicted that the tribulations described in the Apocalypse of John would arrive imminently, followed by a period of unparalleled peace. By interpreting the biblical description of tribulation and renewal as historical in character, Joachim activates a revolutionary hope for transformation in time, one that went on to inspire his followers to proclaim the advent of Joachim's spiritual age. 3 Vattimo thus stands in a long line of those which saw themselves as verging on a new era of freedom, but in this he shares an error common to Joachim's disciples and his most bitter detractors. Whereas Vattimo supposes that the Age of the Spirit replaces the ecclesial institutions that preceded it, Joachim is clear that they will persist; and while Vattimo supposes that Joachim's spiritual interpretation of scripture replaces literal readings, Joachim sees them as operating harmoniously together -a pattern of continuity in difference that is exemplified by the unity-in-distinction of the Trinitarian persons.Whereas Vattimo's account of 'the new -postmodern -age of being' 4 depends upon a momentous misreading of Joachim's texts, Joachim's account of the relationship between time and transformation offers a corrective to Vattimo's enthusiasm for the present moment. Under the force of his insistence that the future and the past remain intertwined, Joachim develops a vision of what the future might bring while admitting that, since the coming age remains unfulfilled, such suggestions remain uncertain. Against a triumphalist postmodernism that would proclaim the arrival of new liberty with respect to the r

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The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.