This following post includes political theology related panels and events happening at the AAR/SBL Conference in San Diego California this year. Below you can find the times, locations, and much more, as it is presented in the online program book.
Even in the midst of an empire that crucifies the innocent for political gain, despair is not warranted. Instead, there is work to be done.
Ubik illuminates what is at stake for the human reimagined as human capital through these transitions, an alienation that expands beyond Joe’s struggles with his apartment door to encompass the deformation of the boundaries of reality itself as he investigates in a world whose ontological foundation has become fluid—commodities are regressing into earlier instantiations of their core use value, and the plot never entirely confirms for us whether it is Joe or his employer who exists in the state of cryonic suspended animation after bodily death that the novel names half-life.
As we ask what it means to love in the face of such loss, Hannah appears with her tears, words, and song to teach us lessons about loss and love. Hannah reminds us to think twice (or thrice) before speaking too soon.
This widow of Mark 12 is the same widow of Psalm 146 and the same widow of the Torah that God promises to uphold, protect, and do justice for. We are called to do the same.
My hope this All Saints Sunday is that we would fully and faithfully engage in the realities of life and death, so that those who have gone before us will continue to inspire us to work towards love for those around us in the land of the living.
The grass seemed greener in Orthodoxy, I’ve realized, because my yearning for authenticity and escape reflected a structural lack embedded in late capitalist dystopia… Today, it seems to me more honest to learn to live with this lack, than to imagine that any faith, flag or folkway can fully fill it.
Many foundational myths of community formation and development situate “after the storm” as the moment when positive change began to happen for them as a people… Isaiah 53:4-12 can be understood as an act of collective storytelling to imagine life “after the storm.”
If we put Amos’ critique in more contemporary language, the “trampling” and “levies of grain” decried in 5:11 are the twin burdens of rents and fees, which often led to cycles of impoverishment and debt slavery. The lifestyles of the rich are financed by extracting from the poor.