Lexington Books The Insurgency of the Spirit: Jesus's Liberation Animist Spirituality, Empire, and Creating Christian Protectors

Review Robert E. Shore-Goss has continually been at the forefront of expanding the theological imagination of our time. The Insurgency of the Spirit is no exception. In a time of climate change, that desperately demands a liberative, anti-colonial ethic and a vision to lead us out of ecological peril, Shore-Goss delivers. He has a gift for both critically and appreciatively engaging complex intellectual histories and debates so that they can become relevant and prescient for the moment. Read this book and allow him to challenge and broaden your perception of the theological landscape before us.--Brooks Berndt, Minister of Environmental Justice and Convener of the Environmental Justice Council of the United Church of Christ Timely and provocative, this anti-imperial, animist, and comparative theology distills wisdom from Christianity, indigenous traditions, and Buddhism to offer vision and hope in facing climate disaster. No one will look at Jesus in the same old anthropocentric way after reading this book. I highly recommend it for faculty and students, religious leaders, and activists.--Kwok Pui-lan, Dean's Professor of Systematic Theology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and author of Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology In The Insurgency of the Spirit: Jesus's Liberation Animist Spirituality, Empire, and Creating Christian Protectors, Shore-Goss writes with passion and intellectual depth in addition to which the range of engagement in this book is astounding. In this electrifying text he draws the reader into a reanimated world and asks them to remain there. Shore-Goss is clear from the start, he says, 'wilderness forms a geographical, cultural, spiritual, and eco-theological symbolics for this book' and this opens the way for the untamed eco-theology that follows. While this book dwells in the wild/ernes and the animist it is also firmly grounded in the person of Jesus and this gives it the unique quality that calls out to people to read it. The central character in Christianity is re-read through wild eyes and found to be larger and more compassionately inclusive than traditionally thought. This 'green Jesus' for Shore-Goss is no simple tree hugger or prophet who begs people to take care of their environment but rather one who gathers the forces of nature in a revolution against all that would make life and all the living denuded through the rupture of interrelatedness across species and all the natural world. Shore-Goss calls for an animist revolution as the place where the healing of the planet and all its inhabitants lies. This call is embedded in scripture and the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who lived in a certain landscape both political and natural and used that landscape to declare a revolution through words and the use of everyday food- bread and wine, which in this story become symbols of an open table as well as radical economics and politics. Shore-Goss is not the first to suggest that the use of bread and wine and the symbols of Eucharist call for radical politics and particularly economics but his use is welcome and eco-based. The land he tells us is generous and of itself gives freely, further the earth itself provides us with solutions to climate change if only we would remain intimately connected to it. The earth gives freely of wind, water and sun all of which offer solutions to the fuel crisis, there is no need to ripe at the belly of Mother Earth to extract fossil fuels. This book offers a radical way to read scripture and to view Jesus and from this starting point to begin the decolonizing of the earth and to turn on its head the centuries of dominance over the earth and its inhabitants that a traditional reading of Christianity has led to. After reading this book it is not possible to demand of the earth but rather to wonder what the earth wants from us. For Shore-Goss and his conversation partners the answer is clear, for the earth to be healed and flourish it mus