![Desire and Meaning in Augustine](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Augustine_Confessiones.jpg)
Language and meaning originate not from a fullness trying to communicate itself but from a lack that strives after enjoyment.
![Women’s Desire for Priests](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mayblin_essay-image-600x450.jpg)
Reflections on a Catholic ‘gender paradox’: When womens’ desire for priests drives the Church’s ‘passionate machine’
![Racializing and Establishing Catholic Heterodoxy: Traffic Stops as Theological Spaces](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/4889244337_663d9212f3_b-600x450.jpg)
As part of a larger project of racial profiling, officer testimonies reveal that the establishment of reasonable suspicion, the search and seizure of vehicles, and the violation of fourth amendment rights of Mexican and Mexican-American drivers often rely on faith-based determinations between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Officers in such cases incorporate information learned at privately-run law enforcement trainings and seminars, where religion, racial profiling, and crimmigration intersect.
![Law and Order Catholicism in the Vietnam War](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CIA_floor_seal.png)
This post considers how the purportedly “secular” state strategically deployed “Catholicism” in its imperial actions abroad and how those reverberated at home. The Central Intelligence Agency found Catholicism to be a useful ideological ally in the struggle against communism during the Cold War, raising up anticommunist, conservative, and largely white US Catholics as ideal citizens at home to support their use of Vietnamese Catholics as anticommunist allies abroad.