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Category: Quick Takes

Political theology animates not only academic discourse but also popular political conversations. Questions of pardon, representation, public values, and more draw upon and develop political theological concepts. Quick takes features voices making the connection between the day’s news and traditions of political theological analysis.

Why Does Political Theology Matter? William Cavanaugh and Vincent Lloyd in Conversation

How is the term “political theology” used today, and how does it add to our understandings of theology and politics?

Just Peace through Participation in Colombia

Beyond electoral victories for the nobodies, this is how the systems that produce “nobodies” might be transformed: through nobodies becoming political actors and what Pope Francis calls “social poets of transformation.”

Faith Without Compulsion: Reflections on Iran

Above and beyond the heartache that recent events in Iran engender among Muslims and people who are in solidarity with us, it harms what we truly and communally care about: finding creative ways to reassert who we are and what we stand for.

The Queen is Dead: Long Live Some Kind of Republic.

People need structures to believe in, to focus their hopes and fears on – and when those structures disappear, the rupture can be disturbing, as those energies quickly get re-configured around something else.

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?

Who is Afraid of Allah? On Muslims Sans Muslimness

For Muslims to become worthy of any empathy and solidarity, whether in the west or in staunchly anti-Muslim India, what must first be shed is our very religiosity. Islam is to be tolerated only when reduced to culture in which the dominant-caste or white friend can joyously celebrate Muslim festivities, visit Muslim friends and restaurants for biryani in Toronto or Delhi, or post Sufi songs on their social media. Those are the parameters set around reception of a Muslim sans Islam.

Three Putins

While NATO had pursued discussions with Ukraine, there was no plan to add Ukraine to NATO any time soon. Indeed, most of NATO had resisted incorporating Ukraine exactly because it didn’t want to raise the prospect of conflict with Russia. So, what drives Putin’s aggression now?

The Legacy of ‘Imitatio Christi’: A Conversation About Political Theology

This conversation between Adam Y. Stern and Adriana Alfaro Altamirano joins current debates about authoritarianism and biopolitics, “charismatic authority” and “survival,” through the theological-political lens of ‘imitatio Christi.’

Bruce Springsteen and White, Christian Nationalist Centrism

Demographic lines between urban and rural, white and non-white, male and female, college educated and not college educated mark the partisan divide in America. This commercial somehow finds a “middle” of the country that is rural, white, male, and not college educated.

Sed Contra: How to Deal with Theologians Tweeting Badly

To forego a hermeneutic of charity risks abandoning a central part of the gospel, just as a lack of concern about standing in solidarity with the voiceless, the poor, and the marginalized would do.

John Milbank’s Twitter Bombshell on the Landscape of Identity-Based Theologies

Williams encouraged me, as a theologian, to be a minister in a variety of contexts, to purposefully place myself in uncomfortable situations, to expand my world beyond what I knew already. James Cone challenged me in the same way…

A “Themed Identity” Theologian Responds to John Milbank

When a white scholar embraces a liberationist perspective it is considered pioneering. When I do it I am being “political” not scholarly, then I get labeled a troublemaker. This is the reality Milbank’s tweet is trying to erase, and the reason I spoke out.