What happens when kings and rulers are confronted by a child whose very presence boldly proclaims that God is with us? Sometimes children have an astounding ability to disrupt the status quo. They resist passivity and compliance, they dream boldly and they demand justice. Who are our Immanuels today? And what do we do when we encounter them?
Kingship is an irredeemably hierarchical, patriarchal form of rule, right? Maybe not, says Psalm 146—if the king is God.
How do we then understand a biblical vision of peace relevant for our contexts today? Peace, from a decolonial theological perspective, is not a mere act of non-violence, nor is it about drawing peace plans from the perspective of the powerful global powers; rather, it is about the holistic well-being of the whole creation, coupled with justice, where life matters.
From Colombia to South Africa, from a decolonial stance to trauma theory, these scholars have offered polysemous approaches to the political as well as the theological.
“Ideology asserts that something other than Jesus Christ awakens one from the world’s stupor, but no other force is adequate to the task.”
Jesus’s violent crucifixion exposes the inadequacy of Roman “justice” and raises important questions that are deeply relevant for today. For example, what aspects of our justice systems are designed—intentionally or unintentionally—to diminish human dignity and even dehumanize people?
We present some AAR/SBL Annual Meeting 2025 sessions sponsored by the PTN-afilliated Political Theology Program Unit.
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).
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.
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?
What can the Vatican’s meeting of Catholic influencers can tell us about religion in the digital age?
