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Essays

“In My Father’s House” – The Politics of Belonging in Luke 2:41-52

By reimagining belonging as Jesus did—focusing on relationship rather than societal status—we are called to open the doors of God’s family wide, embracing the diversity of God’s creation with love, dignity, and grace.

Decentering History: Animals, Politics, and Religions

These books demonstrate that animal studies as a new field offers a powerful perspective for understanding the history shared with our companions in the multi-species universe.

Humanity beyond the human: Theorizing War with Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said

I am interested in this sense of the ordinary, ongoing strike. This humble strike—not necessarily modest but rather close to the ground—could involve a politics of refusal and boycott, where those terms could be understood not only as negatives, but also as holding space for a new international community, and thus connecting explicitly something already connected or entangled in practice.

Love, Unexpected

In inaugurating this new world through this birth, Luke shows us that God is and will not be bound by these political structures. Joseph went with Mary, but the baby was ultimately born under cover of darkness, nameless, undocumented, and outdoors.

Liberalism’s Death Has No Afterlife. Perhaps That’s a Good Thing.

What might it mean to learn from the past now that time has moved on and “the past” now refers to a bygone era of liberal hegemony?

On Being a Weapon:  Jewishness 431 days into a Genocide 

In being used as a weapon, American Jews—even those who resist state power—find ourselves imbued with a power we did not want, playing a role for which we did not audition. Rather than gifted with a second sight, we are caught inside a hall of mirrors.

On the Ubiquity of Entropy

The novel questions whether “real life” is more real than “half life” and thereby becomes an allegory for how the “other world” of religious imagination colonizes “this world”. Dick constructs the relation between the “real world” and the “other world,” between immanence and transcendence, according to the psycho-dynamics of revealed, monotheistic religion.

A Refiner’s Fire in Political Chaos

When, despite Scripture, unscrupulous officials continue to “oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow, and the orphan” and “thrust aside the alien,” and a plurality of white, evangelical Christian voters endorse this behavior, how might other believers keep up faith and hope in a Gospel order that upholds justice?

I Am the Brand Name

If the translator’s mistake appears to grotesquely reverse the great metaphysical reveal of Dick’s work, which is to say that it reduces the mysterious and omnipotent Ubik to nothing more than a commercial trademark like Apple, Google or Nike, it is typical that the author himself finds something perversely right – indeed wonderful — in its essential wrongness: Dick already knew very well, after all, that capitalism can quite literally change your life.

(How to Do) Political Theology Without Men?

Has there been something fundamental to political theology that has made it a more convenient environment for men, and less so for women and non-binary people? What specific concepts, intellectual structures and paradigmatic convictions have made this specific field such a manly business?