When Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene compared Donald Trump to Jesus Christ, she wasn’t just being provocative. She was revealing the political logic that holds Trumpism together…and, as subsequent events would show, its limits.
We asked Aaron Hollander and Sonia Velázquez to reflect on each other’s recent books. Here, Velázquez explores the intersection of hagiography, aesthetics, and politics.
Scripture invites those who thirst today, such as those traversing the Sonoran desert in the hope of a liveable existence, to raise their voice in protest, to insist that their human value be recognized. And it invites those of us who have plenty to amplify that complaint, to set aside the anxieties of those seeking to maintain lopsided power and position, and partner with the Divine.
Narendra Modi’s strongman persona rests on a paradox: he must be both an ordinary man of the people and an extraordinary figure above ordinary politics. Farmers and students have repeatedly exposed the fragility of that exceptional claim.
The basic assumption of Jesus’s parable is not that one must act a certain way for the giver, but rather that it is good and right and beneficial for all to have a daily living wage, with no strings attached.
Trump’s charisma and meteoric rise in politics is merely the culmination of White evangelicals’ search for a hero that would kick the asses of liberals and the nation’s external enemies.
The human being, Günther Anders proposes, is a creature distinguished by its lack of a fixed place or definite purpose in the order of creation. Before being “in the world,” the human finds itself added on to it: superfluous, obsolete, excluded.
Since I write from an African Pentecostal theological perspective, I must ask: In what ways can a theology of blindness enable us to rethink the Spirit and Christ within postcolonial imperialism so they are not immediately reduced to spectacle?
The deeply politico-theological questions of shame as an act, guilt as an affect, and redemption as an aspiration remain, to my mind, under-examined in genealogies of modern political ideas, especially regarding the narration and critique of imperial history.
The Exodus tradition is built on a hope for a world free from military violence and economic exploitation. The Song of the Sea looks forward to a world where the machines of war, banished to the bottom of the sea, can no longer threaten us.
Prophets certainly tend to be charismatic, which suggests that charisma can potentially serve as an index of ethical leadership, but prophets aren’t always charismatic, at least not in an obvious way.