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Category: Justice

Though a commitment to justice animates many projects across the field of political theology, debate about what justice entails is at least as common as agreement. Classical concerns include the just distribution of goods, the equal access to public accommodations, and the fair protection from violent incursion. These are amplified and reconfigured in an age of rising economic inequality, mass incarceration, and the increased surveillance and discipline of bodies by corporate and government institutions.

Resources

Bibliography:

  1. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015)
  2. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (2011)
  3. Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (2018)
  4. Miguel De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness (2017)
  5. Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love (2017)
  6. Traci C. West, Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (2019)

Relevant Journal Articles:

  • Vincent Lloyd, “For What Are Whites to Hope?” Political Theology 17, no. 2 (2016): 168-181
  • Linn Tonstad, “Debt Time is Straight Time,” Political Theology 17, no. 5 (2016): 434-448
  • Monica Coleman, “Metaphysics, Metaphor and Multiplicity: A Postmodern Womanist Theology for Today’s Thorniest Religious Issues,” Political Theology 18, no. 4 (2017): 340-353
  • Nindyo Sasongko, “Epistemic Ignorance and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Righting the Wrongs of the Past and the Role of Faith Community,” Political Theology 20, no. 3 (2019): 280-295
Response: The Business of War, the Labor of War

A full-scale war might spectacularly display the deaths and violence that immediately bring people’s attention. However, an excessive profit-driven business may also kill as many people as war does, while in many cases, these deaths are invisible.

Transformative Justice is Resistance to the Military-Industrial Complex

By working to abolish policing and prisons as we know them today, prison and police abolitionists are engaging in the kind of activism that can resist and dismantle these interconnected evils at the same time. In other words, transformative justice and prison abolition are ways to resist the military-industrial complex.

Justice and the Use of Private Military and Security Contractors

Transforming war into a capitalist imperative, the expanded use of PMSCs makes it more difficult to place democratic checks upon military power, commodifies war in a fashion that obscures its tragedy and misery, and threatens to further constrict the role of justice in determining military engagements.

Christian Ethics and the “Problems” of Business and War

Above all, the Christian tradition urges us to reject the application of war metaphors to the market, as if it were a bloody realm of unavoidable tragedy and exclusively self-focused interest. It is not—or should not be—and the temptation to accept economic “tragedy” is really just the temptation to fail to love God and the neighbor, theologically speaking.

Crip Time, Sacred Time, and Holding History

Though theologies and practices vary, many Christians commit to sacred times of relation, mutual care, and patience as a form of devotion to God’s promise of justice, believing that this promise is their work to carry out, too. In the Sabbath lives a wider, eternal perspective and sacred release from daily rhythms, obligations, and productivity, an invitation into the transcendent.

Eugenics, immigration law, and Christian support

Christian-affiliated people who want to heed and hear victim-survivors’ voices and seek justice with violence affected groups need to contend with histories of support for racist, colonial, and sexist policies and programs. This blog post is an expression of my effort to do that.

Bernard Stiegler on the Dangers of the Digital

Stiegler argues that capitalism has now reached its limits and that the future of the planet in what he calls ‘control societies’ echoing Deleuze is open to question.

Objectification of Comfort Women and the Theology of #WithYou

These protests, the victims’ testimony, and the courage of survivors remind us that it is time to turn off the powerful sound of the perpetrators’ dominant voices and tune in to the voices of the oppressed.

Global Health and Just Peace Ethic for Security Strategy in the COVID-19 pandemic

During this global pandemic, a theological imagination contributes to helping us draw on a public health approach to our security strategies and shift focus to a just peace framework.

A Redemptive Reading of Proverbs 31:10-31 in the Context of the Comfort Women

The survivors were oppressed and deprived of their freedom, dignity, identity, womanhood, and youth. However, they are now human rights movement activists, teachers, living testimony of the painful history, and much more.

The Banality of Oppression: Memory, Theology, and the Suffering of Chinese Comfort Women

Remembering a future that is habitable for humanity and receptive to justice requires remembering the inconvenient past that, when surfaced, can threaten the status quo.