Ten years ago, the appearance of a volume entitled Michel Foucault and Theology might have been surprising. Over the past decade, however, the strategy of employing ‘continental’ criticisms of ‘traditional’ religion and theology in order to advance the ends of contemporary religious and theological reflection has become something of a cottage industry. Generally speaking, projects of this kind seek to curb the absolutist tendencies of traditional theology by focusing on the significant degree to which the doctrinal and moral commitments of any religious community are shaped by its social and political circumstances.

The driving motivation of this strategy is largely emancipatory; the hope is that recalibrating the scope and limits of theology in view of its historically effected character might result in liberation from certain repressive principles and practices that the tradition treats as absolutes, but that turn out, upon closer inspection, to be social constructions that may be carefully dismantled and then faithfully reframed in the light of the present situation. The first social construction to be dismantled, typically, is the dominant notion that theology is (and always has been) an essentially theoretical task aimed at securing systematic knowledge of God. Once this narrow interpretation of theology is overcome – usually by showing that few texts in the history of theology actually answer to this description – the way is then open to return to the tradition in order to excavate and redevelop the other histories of theology (mystical, political, ascetic) that were ploughed under as the dominant history advanced.

Recent French philosophy has proved fertile ground in which to dig for such alternatives. But while many spades have turned to this end in the work of Derrida and Levinas, comparatively few have broken ground in Foucault's writings. Bernauer and Carrette's purpose in Michel Foucault and Theology is to showcase the variety of work produced in this developing field over the past fifteen years. Part anthology and part proceedings volume, their book brings together thirteen essays written by a split ticket of religion scholars (including Carrette, Elisabeth A. Clark and Mark D. Jordan) and philosophers (including Bernauer, John D. Caputo and Thomas Flynn). Of the contributions on offer, seven are reprints of articles dating from 1992–2000, and six are new pieces culled from the programme of a recent colloquium.

The range of topical coverage is wide, and includes essays on the relevance of Foucault's work to everything from power politics in the early Christian church, to the Islamic revolution in Iran, to the Catholic origins of contemporary Western attitudes towards homosexuality. Though the editors have divided this smorgasbord into four distinct sections (The Church in Late Antiquity, Politics and Theology, Theological Knowledge, and Theology and Sexuality), the substantial overlap in content across the four rubrics, coupled with the wide variance in methodology, scope and target-audience among the essays within each grouping, make the headings seem a bit ad hoc. In reading through the section entitled ‘Foucault and Theological Knowledge’, for instance, one encounters an analytic-style introduction to the religious availability of Foucault's thought, followed by a highly specialised continental-style essay on ‘exomologesis and aesthetic reflection’, followed by a genre-busting piece that draws on Foucaultian premises to prosecute the claim that ‘musicality is an irreducible domain of theological knowledge’ (p. 181). The question of whether this unique pacing is a virtue or a vice must be answered by the individual reader; some will likely deem it bracing, others may find it erratic.

In its best moments, the volume succeeds as both an introduction to and a scholarly advancement of its subject-matter. Non-specialists will appreciate the inclusion of expository essays that provide jargon-free access not only to the religiously relevant facets of Foucault's work, but also to the general contours and key terminology of his overall project. The highlights on this front are Bernauer and Carrette's ‘Introduction’ and chapters 3, 4 and 7, authored respectively by J. Joyce Schuld, James Bernauer and Thomas Flynn. As for new developments, the volume pays welcome attention throughout (especially in chapters 2, 4, 8 and 12) to the religious and political significance of the tradition of Christian asceticism, an often neglected facet of the Western theological heritage to which Foucault himself paid careful attention late in his career. Within the collection itself, this emphasis on asceticism provides a fresh counterpoint to the predictable and repetitive associations of Foucault's critique of knowledge with ‘mysticism’ or ‘negative theology’. Moreover, in identifying Foucault as a thinker who can help us to bring the traditions of negative theology and asceticism into a contemporary dialogue, this volume might inspire future work on the intriguing question of why recent ‘continental’ appropriations of negative theology have largely ignored the arduous regimes of ascetic practice that historically have gone hand-in-glove with mystical theologies.

The collection has its flaws as well. The submission of the volume under the name of ‘theology’ might strike some theologians as curious, given that the essays focus largely on religious anthropology, and offer little concrete advice as to how Foucault might help us to reframe traditional theological constructs, such as the attributes of God, the nature of revelation, theodicy and soteriology. When the essays do explicitly address ‘theology’ rather than ‘religious experience’, they sometimes resort to a simplistic juxtaposition of two reductive caricatures: first, there is the tyrannical theology of the monotheistic tradition that is prone to ‘asserting authority through blind intellect’ (p. 4) and ‘attempt[ing] to obliterate the possibility of difference and diversity’ (p. 218); second, there is Foucault's emancipatory ‘negative theology’ that ‘celebrates the human being's resistant openness’ (p. 91), ‘delegitimates [the tradition's] totalising thinking’, and gives way to a ‘non-unitary theology of religious pluralism and an open-textured process of self-transformation’ (p. 192). I suspect that Thomas Flynn is correct in observing that this version of ‘mysticism’ may ‘strike many as meagre rations for souls athirst for the living God’ (p. 152). Moreover, just as many will likely see the irony of a blistering critique of ‘totalising’ discourse that so readily reduces millennia of theological inquiry to a monolithic totality. The claim that such a global critique of Western theology should be associated with Foucault, finally, will sit ill with those who follow Gary Gutting in reading Foucault's critiques of knowledge as regional (that is, as addressed to particular practices at specified locations and times) rather than global in their scope.