We don’t need scholars to tell us that Jewish radicalism is something of the past, dead, buried, and long forgotten. The world already tells us that every day. We need articulations of Jewish radicalism for today that activate its legacy.
The Catholic Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost explores the contradictions of incarnation in ways relevant to contemporary discourse between Catholicity, political theology, and transfeminism. By engaging with the carnivalesque and Freud’s uncanny, I will apply the story to conversations about trans inclusion in Catholic communities.
If someone is in an abusive relationship, are they to forgive their abuser? If someone is actively and repeatedly harming us, are we to forgive them? If this theological-ethical conundrum gives you pause, you are not alone.
While giving tribute to Fuchs’s noteworthy efforts at reimagining our understanding of moral norms by appreciating the emergent process of human evolution through the appropriation of a dynamic/future-oriented theological anthropology, this analysis will seek to press the limits of his robust framework whilst inquiring what an ethic of vulnerability might look like in an age of terrestrial/ecological crisis.
The tendency to shy away from difficult interpretations not only renders Scripture less impactful but also dilutes the lived experiences of those who confront these realities daily and seek to make meaning of what is happening to them.
The lived practices of Afro-Bolivian farmers invite not only a philosophical reinterpretation of vulnerability but also a rethinking of Catholic social thought. Their adaptive and relational forms of life disclose a theological reconfiguration of Catholic political theology.
By revisiting the myth of Joan of Arc, Daniel Bensaïd endows his political militancy with a potential theological scope: that of a de-phallicized thinking of the divine.
Saving ourselves is not about creating an escapist bubble of churchly naivety while the world crumbles around us…
The question is not only whether Catholics and Calvinists can understand one another better doctrinally. It is whether they can think together about concrete political questions and their entanglement with power, authority, and the conditions necessary for a more just and peaceful society.
Inspiration comes from previously off-limits traditions, just as emotions once dismissed as despairing gain untold potentials: this is the turn from leftist melancholy to melancholy politics.
For African Political Theology to be Christian, African, and praxis-oriented, its concern must be Africans; Africans in a universal and “Afropolitan” sense, that is, all of those Africans gifted with God’s image, and as such, God’s children.
The world is impossibly complex now, and will only continue to be so. We must learn to adapt to this complexity, to dance with it and to allow it to be what it is.