David Kline introduces the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann for political theology and reflects on how it might think about its own limits of observation.
“Perhaps it is in precisely this ambivalent way that air (and Irigaray) reminds us of just how much we belong—to the air itself, to this emptiness that hovers and sings in lifedeath. We might forget air, we might forget that we breathe, or how to breathe. But air does not forget us. And air will never cease to carry us, to lift us up, to set us into flight, even when we no longer live in a body that tried (if unsuccessfully) to fly.”
Federici provides a model for political theologians engaging with race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of capitalist oppression
A short overview of Kojin Karatani’s Marxist influenced focus on modes of exchange as revealing the Borromean ring of Capital-Nation-State, and the import of this ring for religion.
There are at least six identifiable and interrelated relationships in the three books under consideration in this forum. Investigations into the nature, expectations, and communicative barriers in any given relationship is of value to our broader scholarly field but so too is asking how the contours of one relationship may impact that of another
Regardless of our interrogation of it, the terminology of “religion” is operative in the world—not only among the scholars who frame it as a second-order category, but among our interlocutors and kinship networks. Given the baggage that often accompanies it, perhaps it is unsurprising that so many of us are hesitant to apply this label to the people, places, and practices to which we attach meaning.
MOVE, while an illiberal religion characterized by abrasive rhetoric, is nonetheless an example of the religification of law and the legal system. MOVE activists refused to surrender the court to the state, seeing the legal system as a potential tool against the state, rightly beyond state control.
Trump supporters will not abandon him in the 2020 presidential election. They believe they are doing the will of God, and the theology that God uses sinners to accomplish His purpose now means divine purpose will be fulfilled through the president’s sins.
Could prophetic politics, with its unique emphases, allow us to envision another, possibly less dogmatic and more differentiated form of political theology? Could focusing on the schism between prophetic voice and political institutions reveal a different understanding of political theological concepts, beyond the realm of power and sovereignty?
How we conceive of diakonía sheds a potentially critical light on existing roles and institutions associated with ‘service’.
Rather than understanding political theology as a single school of thought, I seek to define political theology as a more inclusive category by looking at the rich historical resources within each of the Abrahamic religions that help each tradition unpack the complex relationship between the political and theological spheres