The secular age is not a smooth, untroubled process of accumulation and advance but an uneven and unpredictable series of clashes of interest. Charles Taylors immanent frame cannot be construed merely as a phenomenon within religion and culture but urgently needs to be understood in political and economic termsi.e., as a class project. The failure of the secular, vividly displayed in the crumbling legitimacy of global institutions and in the spectacle of police violence, both calls for and makes possible a renewal of political agency. Tom James and David True argue that a theology of the cross has a distinctive potential today: it can pierce the sacred aura of normalcy around the consensual anti-politics of the neoliberal order so that a vision of a world beyond todays racialized capitalism can emerge. But they contend that we dont need to forsake the emancipatory aims of modernity nor retreat to local communities. As an alternative to these weak strategies, theyoffer a constructive and cruciform account of political agency that includes both prophetic resistance and practical wisdom, each embedded in contemporary struggles for freedom that, they argue, embody divine desire for a common world.

Tom James is a pastor in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author ofIn Face of Reality: The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman (2014) and co-author ofA Philosophy of Christian Materialism (2015).

David True is a visiting scholar at Pfeiffer University and is co-editor of the journal Political Theology. He is the co-editor ofParadoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition (2020) and the editor ofProphecy in a Secular Age: An Introduction (2021). 

1. Introduction: The Politics of Death.- 2. Renewing Political Agency: Arendt on Natality and Judgment.- 3. Theology's Re-politicizing: Crisis and Critique.- 3. Transcendence in a Secular Age: Cruciform Desire.- 4. The Problem and Promise of Politics.- 5. Prophetic Agency.- 6. Practical Agency.- 7. The Church as a Community of Desire.