The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylors award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of Lockdown America and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a theatrics of state terror, Taylor identifies and analyzes its instrumentsmass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishmentthrough which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the United States a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism.

Against this, The Executed God proposes a counter-theatrics to state terror, a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire.

Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms a liberating material spirituality to unseat the state that kills.

Mark Lewis Taylor is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2001) and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. He is also editor of Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (Fortress Press, 1991) and co-editor of Reconstructing Christian Theology (Fortress Press, 1994).