Andrew Shanks

On Hope and Holy Anarchism : Philosophical Theology and the Solidarity of the Shaken Andrew Shanks

On Hope and Holy Anarchism offers an original scholarly work attempting to develop the standpoint of those who think of themselves as religious/Christian anarchists, or who are interested in understanding anarchism. Holy anarchism, Andrew Shanks argues, is in one sense a name for the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount. But in another sense, it is an ideal that has only now become fully thinkable: in the world of present-day civil society and its public conscience movements.

Dorothy Day is officially a candidate for canonisation, expected to be the first Roman Catholic official saint to have been, in her own lifetime, a self-professed ‘anarchist’. Part One of On Hope and Holy Anarchism consists of a grand-narrative meditation on this and a critical dialogue with the great Marxist philosopher, author of The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch. Part Two consists of two portraits: one of Dorothy Day and the other of the Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox pioneer educationalist Asfaw Yemiru.

Part Three is largely focused on recruiting the philosopher D. G. Leahy (1937 – 2014) to the cause of ‘holy anarchism’.

Henri Bergson’s distinction between ‘static’ and ‘dynamic religion’ also features here: inasmuch as ‘holy anarchism’, Shanks argues, essentially liberates the latter from the former. Here, ‘holy anarchism’ is discussed in three genres – grand narrative/biography/[trans-]metaphysics – to provide a rounded, three-dimensional celebration. The three genres are complementary, each strengthening the other two.

Hope, it is argued here, is truly a virtue insofar as it energises our response to the infinite imperatives of ‘truth-as-openness’.