xbn .

Jonathan Tran

Dr. Jonathan Tran, Associate Professor of Theology and George W. Baines Chair of Religion at Baylor University, is currently working on or has recently completed book projects in each of his three main research areas: language, race (Asian Americans and the Spirit of Capitalism, Oxford University Press 2021), and Christianity and the Promise of Politics (in a volume co-authored with Stanley Hauerwas). Originally from Southern California, Dr. Tran joined Baylor’s Religion Department in 2006 after completing graduate studies in theology and ethics at Duke University. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses and his research examines the theological and political implications of human life in language.

Essays

The Author’s Response, Part 2

Racialized white identity no doubt exerts enormous power, but that power and its meaning are hardly unchanging and self-interpreting. In our desire to disabuse whites of power we should weary of reifying white racial identity as something that determines history without answering to it.

The Author’s Response, Part 1

I interpret the questions put to my political economic approach like this: While Tran’s racial capitalist emphasis on structures and systems seems mostly correct, rightly deflating individualists/personalist (“identarian” as I say in the book) accounts of racism and accordingly moving the conversation forward, it misses something crucial.

Brethertonian Thinking

According to Luke Bretherton, theologians, in forgetting that prophetic critique presumes eschatological affirmation, have yet to understand what the work of theology comes to.

The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.

Pussy Riot and the Church

This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.

In Memoriam:                                                                      Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas and the Journey of Theology Toward the Future

The prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon (Ecumenical Patriarchate) passed in Athens, on February 2, 2023.

Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?