Energy and Change - (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and C) by Clayton Crockett (Paperback)

About the Book

Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion.

Book Synopsis

As humanity continues to consume planetary resources at an unsustainable rate, we require not only new and renewable forms of energy but also new ways of understanding energy itself. Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion.

Crockett argues that change is foundational to material reality, which is ceaselessly self-organizing. We can observe energy's effects in the operations of natural selection as well as those at work in human societies. Matter and energy are not an oppositional binary; rather, they are expressions of how change functions in the universe. Ultimately, Crockett argues, we can conceive of God neither as a deity nor as a being but as the principle of change.

Informed by cutting-edge theoretical discourses in thermodynamics, science studies, energy humanities, systems theory, continental philosophy, and radical theology, Energy and Change draws on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Zizek, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, and Kojin Karatani as well as ideas about spirituality, society, and nature from Amerindian, Vodou, and Neo-Confucian traditions. A foundational work in New Materialist philosophy of religion, this book offers compelling new insights into the structure of the cosmos and our place in it.

Review Quotes

An exciting new title from one of the most original theologians of his generation. Clayton Crockett unfolds with unrelenting inventiveness the implications of the simple but revolutionary premise that everything changes. To be is to be transformed, in physics as in life, in theology as in biology. From the transformation of energy to the energy of transformation, from 'being' to 'God, ' if you like. Don't miss it!

--John D. Caputo, author of In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations

In characteristically exuberant prose and across nearly every discipline, Energy and Change interprets and contests the convulsive neoliberal ideologies accelerating our ecological disaster. Amplifying the work of 'new materialism' with a full-fledged philosophy of energy, this is the book that fans of Clayton Crockett have been waiting for.

--Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters

Somehow Clayton Crockett breaks open a perspective as spacious as the cosmos and as timely as our globally warming moment. This magnificent volume energizes the matter--the physical and biological material--of the new materialism, conducting it with utterly legible brilliance through current politics and economics, through decolonial and plural worlds of spirit, through radical theology. At every twist, Energy and Change intensifies the possibility, the precarious chance, of the change all sane earthlings now require.

--Catherine Keller, author of Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances

Energy is constant and yet it changes. It is constant because it changes and changes because it is constant. This paradox has been inscribed at the heart of physics and philosophy since the pre-Socratics and up to Einstein. Through an erudite and thoughtful exploration, Crockett offers a radical theological approach to this cosmological enigma.--Catherine Malabou, author of Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains

About the Author

Clayton Crockett is professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (2011) and Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (2013) and coauthor of An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics (2016), all from Columbia University Press. He is also a coeditor of the series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.