Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate "the natives." Redeeming Anthropology explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a "faith in mankind" have vacillated between rejecting and embracing theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways. Mining the biographical registers of the American, British, and French anthropological traditions, Khaled Furani argues that despite all efforts to the contrary, theological sediments remain in this disciplining discipline. Rather than continuing to forget, deny, and sequester it, theology can serve as a mirror for introspection, as a source of critique offering invaluable tools for revitalization: for thinking anew not only anthropology's study of others' cultures, but also its very own reason.

This book assembles a paradigm of anthropodom--anthropology governed and constituted by sovereign secular reason as a progeny of the Enlightenment--in order to explore existent and potential relations with its ostensible other, theology.

"What is the proper role of humans in light of the ecological crisis? After a sympathetic and critical analysis of the principal answers to that question, Stephen Scharper argues that only a religious point of view - seeing human agency as central to both the devastation and the reclamation of planetary life - is viable. Such a view must include social, economic, cultural, as well as theological transformation in order to be effective in confronting threats to the ecosystem." "Among the principal answers or "paradigms" assessed by this book are the new cosmology, ecofeminism, process thought, Gaia theory, and liberation theology. Each of these recognizes the role of the human in the present environmental crisis. But each of these also approaches the "human problematic" in incomplete or inadequate ways. Thus, Redeeming the Time is both an examination of the state of the question, and a constructive effort at building among the various current paradigms and remedying, or redeeming, their inadequacies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Originally publihsed: Delhi: Permanent Black, c2007.

His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.--Timothy Jones, Ph. D. student, Boston University School of Theology "Homiletic"