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David Newheiser

David Newheiser is an Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. His research explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2019), editor of The Varieties of Atheism (Chicago, 2022), and co-editor of Art-Making as Spiritual Practice (Bloomsbury, 2025). His current book project considers the link between premodern miracle traditions and democratic imagination.
http://dnewheiser.net

Symposia

Critical Political Theology

By recovering the critical potential of religious practice, this symposium asks how political theology can support democratic institutions that are under threat.

Resisting: Political Theology

Does political theology offer strategies for resisting injustice? Or should political theology itself be resisted?

Essays

The Secularization of Hope Revisited

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.

There is Power in Negative Political Theology

Negativity cuts against a politics of nostalgia (which seeks to conserve the imagined glories of the past) and apocalypse (which rejects the world as irredeemably compromised)

Atheism and the Critique of Sovereignty

By disrupting pernicious claims to transcendence, atheist political theologies can help us redress suffering in particular places while keeping hope for radical transformation.

Political Theology Is Not Theological Enough