A Materialism for the Masses

Hent de Vries, Johns Hopkins University:
In this exciting new study, Ward Blanton further solidifies his reputation as the most adventurous and rigorous scholar of his generation as he reimagines the historical meaning and political impetus of early Christianity and its ongoing, indeed increasing, effect on the most enduring philosophical and ethical questions of our time. A worthy successor to his groundbreaking Displacing Christian Origins, the argument of A Materialism for the Masses is deeply original and, once again, compellingly demonstrated. Much has been made in recent years of the return of the idea of communism, the common, and the concept of materialism it must necessarily invoke, perhaps resuscitate. Here Blanton fills an important lacuna in this debate by offering an extensive prolegomenon to any future materialist spirituality that deserves its name. He does so by revisiting the archival source and conceptual apparatus found in St. Paul's New Testament letters and some of the early Church Fathers, among others, whose fortuitous return to actuality under presumed postsecular conditions we have barely begun to comprehend in all of its promise and no less pertinent peril. He demonstrates that reviving the political Paul neither commits us to the reductive materialisms nor to otherworld religiosities of old but prepares us for a world without foreseeable limits or end, a world in which we may once again come to believe—that is to say, an eternal life for which we must be ready to fight and create. Timely and provocative, Blanton's book challenges our preconceptions with a thorough scholarly treatise that proceeds in the guise of a deeply personal and passionate manifesto, therefore advancing and altering the terms of conversation as all insurrectional thinking surely must do.

Laurence L. Welborn, Fordham University:
Ward Blanton attempts nothing less than the overthrow of an understanding of Paul that has dominated philosophical criticism since Nietzsche. Blanton is convinced that Paul is better understood within a repressed tradition of Western thought that Althusser called a 'materialism of the encounter' and that Blanton names 'materialist spirituality.' He pursues two intertwined goals: the destruction of the image of Paul as a metaphysical dualist and the resurrection of an originary Paulinism which is materialist in invigorating life in this world with messianic hope. Blanton writes with an intensity that is hypnotic. There is nothing like his book in existing scholarship.

James Crossley, University of Sheffield:
Ward Blanton's handling—and mastery—of Western philosophical traditions provides a much more convincing account of Christian origins as well as a greater appreciation of the ways in which power works in the present.