Theology Comedy Politics (Dispatches)

What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon Hans Urs von Balthasar and more recently Rowan Williams in their accommodation to literature choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast this book develops recent philosophical anthropological and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical sacramental and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.