xbn .

Essays

Call for Papers: Political Theology Network Conference 2025

Consider submitting to one of six conference streams for PTN Conference 2025 from October 23-26, 2025 in Nashville, TN

Towards a Theory of Multispecies Production, Exchange, and Class Struggle

As pets, animals are care workers, giving solace to lonely humans. In none of these economic spheres are animals passive tools. Like human working classes, animal workers also constantly resist and rebel.

A Psychotherapeutic Reading of Thomas

This reading of Thomas’s story, for me, is a powerful reminder that faith is not a straight line from doubt to belief. It is a complex journey through relationship, rupture, and repair. From the perspective of self-psychology, Thomas represents not merely an individual struggling with uncertainty, but anyone who has experienced the pain of exclusion (a break in connection).

The Politics of Resurrection

If we want to experience the full effect of Easter, we must recognize that it’s not just about Jesus…it sends ripples through the cosmos as it signals the dismantling of worldly kingdoms built on exploitation and invites us to participate instead in a social order that reflects God’s intentions for the flourishing of all.

The Cross as Resistance, Solidarity, and the Triumph of Justice

While deeply engaged with the concerns of everyday life such as healing, feeding, and engaging people in matters of justice and community, Jesus offers an alternative vision: one shaped by self-giving love and radical faithfulness to God’s kingdom, rather than by the structures and strategies of empire.

Active Nonviolence and Legitimate Defense?

The language of ‘right to defense’ has been consistently deployed to legitimate Israel’s general military strategy and ongoing U.S. provision of weapons as its policy. Meanwhile, Pope Francis consistently calls for an end to the mass atrocity of war… Something drastically needs to change.

Generous Foolishness and Foolish Giving

In a time of intense economic anxiety, both individuals and communities need to reflect on the call in John 12 to claim their responsibility to shun greed, resisting it with a seemingly foolish kind of generosity that parallels Jesus’s becoming poor for the sake of others.

Paradise Found: How War Gives Israel Purpose

This theological dimension, which does not exclude messianism but coexists with it, is not new to Zionism and has been present in it from its inception; articulating it will therefore contribute not only to understanding the history of Zionism, which is far from being as peace-seeking as it often tells itself, but also to understanding the wide Israeli support of the genocidal war on Gaza.

Political Science Contributions to Centering Nonviolence

It turns out that when weighing warfare’s costs, benefits, and odds of success, its overall record is surprisingly weak.

PTNCON25: Call for Seminar Streams

The Political Theology Network is hosting our fifth in-person conference, which will be held in Nashville, TN, from October 23-26, 2025. See details below!

Political Theology Journal Welcomes New Members to its Editorial Collective

The Political Theology Editorial Collective welcomes new members Fatima Tofighi and Joseph Winters!

Being Dead and Coming Alive

A colonial understanding of resurrection has only associated it with life after death, whereas a decolonial Dalit theology engages with new life experiences by breaking the grounds of death here and now, in life before death.