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Essays

Challenging the Presumption of Divine Favor

Those who presume upon God’s support but act in ways that defy God’s standard will find their presumption turned upside-down in divine disavowal.

Centering Active Nonviolence in Catholic Social Teaching – Webinar Event, August 11, 12-1pm eastern

Join recent Catholic Re-Visions contributors as they engage the relationship between nonviolence and Catholic social teaching in these times.

The Politics of God’s Sanctuary

God’s sanctuary as a tent and God’s residence in a tent suggest that God is a sojourning God who accompanies people, offering an encampment with and among the communities on their journeys of life.

Two Deadly Sins: The Spiritualization of Poverty and the Patronization of the Needy

The lectionary texts for this week call us to recognize and pursue a spirituality that is holistic; a spirituality that cares for the needs of the poor; a spirituality that takes the side of the needy against the powerful; a spirituality that entails a revolution of the heart; and a spirituality that takes the question of neighbourliness seriously. Such a spirituality would put us on the path of revolutionary neighbourliness.

From the Messy Middle

The planetary activities that spill out beyond the shape of any single form of life, full of uninvited faces, are what Sylvia Wynter calls the “necessary and indispensable preludes” to the emergence of our new self-awareness, to the development of new forms of life.

Allegory or Autobiography?

Sometimes the most I can be grateful for is that it is still possible to imagine an alternative.

Counter-Worlds: Rastafari Sovereignty

The work of autonomous Rastafari world-makers is instructive for continuing to think about the type of resilience, risk, and endurance it takes to ensure the survival of our human species and our planetary home in the face of authoritarian governance.

The Politics of Spirit-Led Freedom: Beyond Empire and Exclusion

As the villagers of Pudukudi Melur showed in their moment of radical hospitality, true freedom is not about protecting one’s rights or maintaining boundaries; it is about breaking them open in love.

“Without God, Within Sky”

I started capturing scenes of weather around my house with my phone. This eventually spiraled into creating a video essay with music and a voice-over of the central sections of the paper.

Stumbling Upon God in Sylvia Wynter’s Fiction

Sylvia Wynter’s fiction invites us to think the secular and the religious together in order to open new “continents of the spirit” and new “planets of the imagination.”

A Tale of Two Mountains

Mt. Carmel represents a very particular vision of Divine power, one dependent on a definition of power that equates it entirely with the strength to impose one’s will on another – even to the point of death. It’s an astonishing demonstration, yet also an extremist one, requiring power to equal unfathomable force: the unquenchable fire and Elijah’s subsequent unquenchable thirst to eliminate his enemies.