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Marcia Pally

Marcia Pally teaches at NYU and held the Mercator Guest Professorship in the theology department at Humboldt University-Berlin, where she is now annual guest professor. Her most recent books are: White Evangelicals and Right-wing Populism: How Did We Get Here (2022), From The Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (2021), and Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (2016).

Symposia

White Evangelicals and Right-wing Populism

The irony of American populism is that the very anti-authoritarianism and community building that contributed much to American vibrancy and that are bequeathed to evangelicals by history and doctrine may under distress turn to self-protective, us-them defense.

Essays

The White Evangelical Vote: An Irony of American Religio-Political Culture

Why is populism persuasive and specifically persuasive to these religious Christians? Said another way, what makes right-wing populism seem, to deeply religious people, like the ‘ethical’ stance?

Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality

A second expression of relationality is covenant. It is a bond between distinct parties where each gives for the flourishing of the other. Unlike contract, which protects interests, covenant protects relationship.

Pandemic Police Populism

Blaming Covid 19 on the World Health Organization or on a lab in China and calling Black Lives Matter “radical leftist extremists” follow the American-populist playbook of responding to duress by targeting an alien “other” who have wronged “us” and whom “we’re” right to combat with force.

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?