Lexington Books
Pages: 316
•
Trim: 6½ x 3
978-1-7936-0434-7 • Hardback • September 2020 • $140.00 • (£108.00)
978-1-7936-0435-4 • eBook • September 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Jacob Marques Rollison is on the board of directors of the International Jacques Ellul Society.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Questions in Dialogue
Part I: Architecture
Chapter 1: Reason for Being: Ellul’s Existential Epistemology of the Present
Chapter 2: Community in the Present: Marx, Institutions, and Language
Part II: Movement
Chapter 3: The Dialogue of Sign and Presence: Presence and Signification in Ellul’s Theological Ethics
Chapter 4: Crises in Communication
Chapter 5: A Hopeful, Spoken Incognito: Presence in the Postmodern World
Conclusion: The Mystery of the Word
Appendix 1: Interpretive Summary of Ellul’s Article “The Dialogue of Sign and Presence” (1936?)
Appendix 2: Ellul’s Honorary Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen
Bibliography
About the Author
Jacob Rollison has woven together numerous strands in the study of Ellul’s writings, presenting a fresh, welcomed challenge to postmodernist trends that devalue the role of language in today’s world. Anyone interested in a theologically-informed ‘ethics of communication’ will profit greatly from this engaging book.— Ted Lewis, Executive Director for the International Jacques Ellul Society
This book represents the arrival of a new generation of serious scholarship on the intellectual legacy of Jacques Ellul and his renewed significance to the pursuit of theologically responsible understandings of our current social and cultural situation in the West. Working on the basis of sustained research into the archive of Ellul’s writings, Rollison offers an account of Ellul’s thinking centred on the concept of presence that is ambitious to confront the heuristic and dialogical challenges of our time. Alert to Ellul’s influences, formative engagements and development, Rollison offers a new understanding of Ellul’s intellectual project as a whole and suggests something of its real continuing import to contemporary theology and ethics.
— Philip G. Ziegler, University of Aberdeen
Jacob Rollison offers us an excitingly new Ellul for an information age, or better, reads the old Ellul comprehensively and with breathtakingly new insight. Rollison traces previously unnoticed shifts in Ellul's thought and indexes them with newly-unearthed biographical details as well as linking his thought for the first time to the main philosophical currents of Ellul's contemporary France. Announcing Christ's presence to modern humanity, Ellul resources contemporary Christians desirous of being genuinely present to a world increasingly talking past one another.
— Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen
Twenty five years after his death, Jacques Ellul is more alive than never with this fascinating book. He shows which would be the actual presence of the Christians in the postmodern world. Very stimulating!
— Frédéric Rognon, University of Strasbourg
Jacob Marques Rollison’s A New Reading of Jacques Ellul is an innovative and bold attempt to introduce a new way of thinking about Jacques Ellul’s entire body of work. A member of the board of directors of the International Jacques Ellul Society, with a PhD in theological ethics from the University of Aberdeen, he is well suited to the task of reinvigorating the study of Ellul for today’s students...Readers might find this to be a bit ambitious for a single-volume work, but I am happy to report that Rollison has succeeded admirably in each of his stated objectives.... I highly recommend this book’s ‘presence’ on your bookshelf.
— Studies in Christian Ethics