In Beyond the Spirit of Empire, the authors analyze the global empire not only in its political and economic dimensions, but also in its symbolic constructions of power and in its general assumptions often taken for granted. How does empire mould human subjectivity, for instance, and how does it affect the understanding of humans within the whole of creation? What are the religious dimensions of empire, its claims to divine attributes like omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternity, and what about its alleged exclusiveness and pervasiveness that destroys human life and freedom, which turns politics into a banal matter? The authors propose to look beyond empire to the possibility of politics and freedom, to the recovery of the notion of people, to the importance of ongoing concern for the oppressed and excluded, and to a messianic faith that allows us to live in anticipation, though ambiguously, of the promise of new times to come.