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Essays

AAR/SBL 2025’s Political Theology Unit

We present some AAR/SBL Annual Meeting 2025 sessions sponsored by the PTN-afilliated Political Theology Program Unit.

Our Common Poverty

Having demythologized and deconstructed our faith, liberals have rightly discarded conservatism’s cruel damnation while keeping our class status, letting our hearts bleed just enough in public so as to not jeopardize having ‘received our reward in full’ (Matthew 6).

All’s Fair?

This one, lone verse from a short New Testament epistle whose authorship is uncertain has had outsized impact on Christian perspectives on hunger: that we should be more worried about getting cheated than we are about neighbors going without food.

Job’s Complaint Against White Sulphur, Gaslighting, Positive Thinking, and Other Forms of Flesh-Eating Violence

If the approach of Job’s friends is an unworthy model, then what else can we do as we listen to the complaints of those who continue to suffer bodily harm in our own time?

Social Media Influencers and the Rise of a Platform Catholicism 

What can the Vatican’s meeting of Catholic influencers can tell us about religion in the digital age?

The Parable of the Widow as an Unsettling Force

This parable is very much about the widow being a “new and unsettling force in the complacent life” of this unrighteous judge and the structures which incentivize his brutality. To speak of the widow in terms of unsettling force is anything but a stretch in this text. In fact, I think you might be surprised at the turn that is coming.

The Politics of Gratitude: When the Marginalised Speak

Luke’s account thus presses towards a re-imagining of community. Belonging is not guaranteed by purity or boundary maintenance but by practices of compassionate recognition.

Imaginative Compassion: When Mustard Seeds Miss the Mark

Does being “without sin” mean never regretting anything, or getting everything right on the first try?

Cultural Christianity’s Secular Cathedral

Macron’s speech in Notre Dame on the occasion of its reopening was a transgression of the principles of French laïcité, confirming the worldwide tendencies towards the increasing culturalization of Christianity and the constant relegation of Islam to the realm of religion.

The Love of Money at the Bitter Roots of Empire

These systemic injustices have a root: the root of a colonial system designed to supplant Indigenous life. They have a genealogy, a history, a process: their ancestor is money and their descendants are death.