each of his particular points can be deepened by a missional approach.Dykstra’s emphasis on practices as creating a space for the work of God‘in us’, for example, can be supplemented by a missional emphasis onthe practices as creating space for God to work ‘through us’. Conneralso discusses the relationship between worship and witness, arguingthat both are subsumed under the missio Dei – hence, there can be noworship without mission and no mission without worship.

An Epilogue ends the work by showing how a missional reading ofChristian practices relates to ministry with the disabled. Hunsberger’schurch-gospel-culture triad is particularly helpful in exploring how thegospel – and Christian practices – can be translated into the ‘language’of the disabled, including those with profound intellectual disabilities.

Conner offers a robust and detailed description of missional theologyand the Practicing Our Faith discussion, and his contention that thelatter can be deepened by attention to the former is persuasive andwell-argued. In particular, the ‘witnessing’ and ‘performative’ aspectsof the practices helpfully supplement their value as ‘formative’ meansof discipleship.

Conner’s work, however, bears the marks of its origins as an inter-disciplinary academic dissertation, and his detailed and focused argu-ment will mean that the readership of this book is likely to be limited.Indeed, the book will mainly be of interest to those who are familiarwith both missional theology and the Practicing Our Faith discussion,and readers seeking a general introduction to either of these areaswould be better served elsewhere. Nonetheless, Conner’s work is ahelpful example of how missional theology and practical theology canwork together in addressing issues of discipleship in today’s culture.

Ed MackenzieMethodist Church House

� � �

A World of Becoming, William E. Connolly, Duke University Press,2011 (ISBN 978-0-8223-4879-5), 216 pp., pb $22.95rirt_1052 300..430

In A World of Becoming, William E. Connolly details what a politicalphilosophy deeply concerned with pluralism and globalization maylook like today. Specifically, he tries to understand how such a politicalphilosophy can include and go beyond the world of humanity toinclude the multitude of complex systems present in our world, eventhose we cannot understand or even know are there. Connolly opts notfor a linear argument, but for an approach to his thesis that is repetitive,

Reviews300

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

circling his core idea without offering a definitive, totalizing statement.He does so due to the nature of his goal in the text, which is to offer arobust account of pluralism through the modes of thinking found incomplexity theory.

Connolly goes about explaining a world of becoming, a world wheremultiple systems and zones of temporality intersect. He articulates sucha world by, in the first chapter, articulating a philosophy of immanencebased upon recent research in complexity theory taking place in varioussciences. Connolly places this research into conversation with White-head to embrace a method of connection over one that seeks indivi-dualism, holism, and organicism. The second chapter explores theattachment that people have existentially to time and the world througha conversation between Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and recentfindings in neuroscience. This chapter problematizes the notion of per-ception, showing that what humans perceive is much more complexthan previously thought. The third chapter is an evaluation of CharlesTaylor’s A Secular Age, where Connolly carries themes of immanence,perception, complexity, and other important points from the first chap-ters into conversation with Taylor. Connolly wants to expand upon themultiplicity of belief in the contemporary world and understand theexistential nature of such beliefs. The fourth chapter uses variousfigures to articulate the idea of a human predicament rather than ahuman condition. In so doing, Connolly shows the connection betweena person’s experience of time, awareness of mortality, and one’s humanpredicament. The result is an expansion of the idea of a person throughmultiplicity, complicating more singular notions of what it means to behuman. The fifth chapter uses the previous arguments to show thecomplexity and multiplicity at work in capitalism. Connolly says capi-talism is a resonance machine made up of a number of different factors– such as state sovereignty, geopolitical relationships, the globalizationof capital, and the distribution of religious people all over the globe –creates a machine of various antagonistic forces. These forces keep themachine operating, which also means that a change in any part can alsolead to changes throughout the machine. The last chapter attempts toopen the space for allowing these changes in thought to come to thefore. Connolly recognizes that times change and that explanations comeand go, where better ideas and more appropriate attempts at under-standing happen. This last chapter tries to set the parameters for allow-ing these changes to occur, where the interruptions of our thought mayhappen. For Connolly, this is not an attempt at control but to under-stand how the world and our understanding of it change and being ableto see when and where these changes may take place.

The major question that came to mind as I read A World of Becomingis ‘becoming what?’ I greatly appreciate his work and argument, butfeel as though Connolly neglects why things become and what they are

Reviews 301

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

becoming. He does not deal with why new systems and life formsemerge. Is it due to the Darwinian survival of the fittest? Is there a godbehind such emergence bringing the world to be? These questions donot seem to have an answer. Similarly, he issues a call to action;however, the question of what kind of action or what the action hopesto accomplish is never dealt with. Thus, the goals Connolly wants toaccomplish are never communicated to the reader. In the course of hisargument this is not a major criticism, but a criticism nonetheless.

One may wonder what this text has to with religion and/or theol-ogy? For religion scholars and theologians, Connolly’s text offers someunique insights. Mainly, his analysis, while traditionally atheistic, takesinto account religion as one of the complex systems at work in ourworld. He takes into consideration the role that religion has in shapingand forming the imaginations of its adherents, to the point where hecan include it among discourses from biology, physics, psychology,sociology, and others. And, while his text is often not easy to getthrough, he does offer a compelling understanding of a pluralisticworld. Thus, for those interested in the intersection of religion andpolitics or those exploring critical theory or pluralism, Connolly’s textoffers a lot of fodder for thought. It is a highly imaginative, well thoughtout piece that can expand our understanding of the world in which welive.

Nathan CrawfordPlymouth, IN

� � �

The Theology of Hugh of St Victor: An Interpretation, Boyd TaylorCoolman, Cambridge University Press, 2010 (ISBN 978-0-521-88625-3),258 pp., hb £53rirt_1053 302..432

Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) was perhaps the most important of a sig-nificant group of teachers belonging to the Abbey of St Victor, justoutside the city walls of Paris, in the first half of the twelfth century – anera of intellectual and social change of such significance that it is fre-quently referred to as a ‘renaissance’. St-Victor itself aimed to couplethe new intellectual developments of the schools with the older idealsof monasticism, and Hugh’s theological writings have as their explicitpurpose the cultivation of good practice, religious and moral. It is in thislight that Coolman presents Hugh. He isolates an overarching theme inHugh’s work – that of reformation, or the ‘re-formation’ of the Christian,construed not merely as restoring what was lost at the Fall (or, as

Reviews302

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.