Call for Papers: Political Theology—The Liberation of the Postsecular?

The Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion is pleased to announce an upcoming conference at Liverpool Hope University, UK, on July 10-12, 2015 exploring the theme: “Political Theology: The Liberation of the Postsecular.” 

Keynote speakers

• Saba Mahmood (Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject )
• Catherine Keller (The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming)
• Katharine Sarah Moody (Post-Secular Theology and the Church: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist )
• Richard Seymour (Against Austerity)

Conference Description

Political theology names a key site where contemporary philosophical engagement with religion takes place. Through notions such as sovereignty, messianism, apocalypse, hope and fidelity, a thinking of political grounds and transformations is never far from the theological. The nature of that relationship is, however, sharply contested.

Is the postsecular a way back to retrieving traditional sources for political sovereignty, or the opening of new possibilities for religion and politics to interact? Does it represent a further victory for Eurocentric understandings of religion and politics, or a way to undermine and move beyond them? As the possibility of revolutionary political change is confronted by the ‘capitalist realist’ sense of the impossibility of imagining how things could ever be radically otherwise, can political theology provide resources for creative advance, both theoretically and practically?

The conference will invite critical and constructive interventions in this debate. Relevant thinkers and traditions of enquiry will include, for example, Agamben, Zizek, Butler, Derrida, Pui-Lan, Schmitt, Taubes, Hardt and Negri, Spivak, Macintyre, Habermas, Mahmood, Foucault, Cone, postcolonialism, new materialism, radical orthodoxy, liberation theologies, feminist theology, queer theology and pragmatism.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts of 200-300 words should be submitted to Steven Shakespeare (shakess@hope.ac.uk) by 28th February 2015.