We don’t need scholars to tell us that Jewish radicalism is something of the past, dead, buried, and long forgotten. The world already tells us that every day. We need articulations of Jewish radicalism for today that activate its legacy.
The Catholic Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost explores the contradictions of incarnation in ways relevant to contemporary discourse between Catholicity, political theology, and transfeminism. By engaging with the carnivalesque and Freud’s uncanny, I will apply the story to conversations about trans inclusion in Catholic communities.
We live in a hyper-ideologized age. The inner circles of both “us” and “them” are getting smaller and smaller. The world is increasingly polarized, partisan, fundamentalist. Or at least it seems so. There are forces—including algorithms—at work, teaching us to think in “us” versus “them” frames.
For African Political Theology to be Christian, African, and praxis-oriented, its concern must be Africans; Africans in a universal and “Afropolitan” sense, that is, all of those Africans gifted with God’s image, and as such, God’s children.
Hope can persist even when things seem impossible. This affinity with the miraculous, rupturing the force of prevailing law, gives hope its extra-rational power.
The essays gathered here seek to critically assess the content and form of Catholic Social Teaching and envision what a catholic political theological engagement might look like beyond an emboldening by magisterial teachings, instead seeking movements, mystics, and people on the margins to exemplify what “catholic” could contribute to larger conversations on political theology.
