
Thoreau’s asceticism was always also related to his hope for just economy – a way of life beyond slavery or exploitative capitalism. I am thus invested in thinking about Thoreau’s religion – his ascetic practice in the woods and the theological commitments that drove it – as deeply tied to his politics.

Thoreau’s generative ambivalence, the reason we keep returning to him, comes from a specific move he makes, over and over again. Thoreau does something very particular for us. He recasts problems of political economy as ethical questions about the conduct of life.

Where the parliamentary organization of the Kingdom took care of the horizontal unity of Crown law, the advent of the new police both represented and ensured its vertical unity, from the streets of Whitechapel to the halls of Westminster.

Born out of the recognition that the place of guns in the United States cannot be adequately explained via statistical data—that qualitative accounts are urgently needed—these approaches aim to understand the logics of self-defense and self-preservation at play in forms of life in which guns have been incorporated.

A central feature of political theology is to expose the problematic ways in which modern political thought attempts to suspend or conceal religious and theological frameworks and, conversely, the ways in which religious and theological belief and practice is itself a mode of political and economic governance