Front Cover; Title Page; Copyright Information; Dedication; Contents; Biographical Information for Contributors; Introduction: The Value of Cultivating Longing in a Secularized World; Part 1. Relating Hope and Utopia; 1. Utopia and Narrative: Theology between the Boundaries of Overhumanization and Hypertheism; 2. Hope, Hatred, and the Ambiguities of Utopic Longing; 3. What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More's Message; 4. Desiring Utopian Subjects: Collectivity and Its Discontents; Part 2. Historical and Literary Utopian Visions
5. John Calvin, Geneva, and Godly Patriarchs: Hope and Reality in the Creation of a Christian Utopia6. Fruit, Fossils, Footprints: Cathecting Utopia in the Work of Miyazawa Kenji; 7. Walter Kerr's Utopia of Re-Creation; 8. Reframed Hope: Transcendent Technology and Spiraling Subjectivity in Dystopian Cinema; Part 3. The Hope for Atheism as a Religious Utopia; 9. Who We Are Is God's Dying: The Real Presence of God's Absence in Bonhoeffer's Prison Poems; 10. TechnoTopia: The Convergence of Art and Technology in the Twentieth Century and Beyond
11. The Coming Community: Agamben, Benjamin, and the Hope for a Materialist-Messianic Redemption of the Present12. No-Places for Sacred Communities: Hope and the Failure of Fight Club; Back Cover
At present the battle over who defines our future is being waged most publicly by secular and religious fundamentalists. 'Hope and the Longing for Utopia' offers an alternative position, disclosing a conceptual path toward potential worlds that resist a limited view of human potential and the gift of religion. In addition to outlining the value of embracing unknown potentialities, these twelve interdisciplinary essays explore why it has become crucial that we commit to hoping for values that resist traditional ideological commitments. Contextualized by contemporary writing on utopia, and drawi