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Essays

Cultivating Justice and Hope amid Different Worlds: An Interview with Silvana Rabinovich

Following this path, I intended to do a non-punitive reading on Cain’s wandering by presenting it as God’s opportunity to cultivate the land while moving around the territory. This view of the nomad seeks to rehabilitate another type of relationality with the Earth by recovering its dignity in different horizons.

Real or Rhetorical Humility

Like the humble talk in the psalm, this hand-wringing fear about a loss of Christian identity in the US masks the devastating power that white Christians wield against others in this country and elsewhere. It is a rhetorical humility in the service of actual power and dominance.

Trans Talmud Reminds Us Things Aren’t Forever Doomed to Suck

Max Strassfeld’s groundbreaking Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature is a masterclass in denaturalizing oppressive structures. As political backlash against trans folk continues its deadly escalation, Trans Talmud is a crucial intervention in both scholarly and explicitly political domains.

Contested Signs

The son of Man, the son of God gives us a sign that, once more, he is not only at odds with but opposed to the structures that administer (a certain kind of) life and death.

From the Archives: Hope

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Political Theology, we are diving into the journal’s archives to share highlights of what we have published. In this installment, here are some of the articles we have published on questions of hope:

The Light in the Darkness

In this passage in John, light is associated with Jesus and with the love of God for the entire world. Light is explicitly linked with a capacious love that was present from the beginning of creation and includes all of creation. It is therefore opposed to racism of any kind. 

Political Theologians: Lauren Olamina and Ramakrishna Paramahansa

Dismantling institutionalized religion by empowering the masses.

Possessed by Jesus

In a world of increasing anti-Jewish sentiments, we do well to note at whom Jesus points a finger. It’s not at Judaism, it’s at Rome.

AAR Political Theology Unit Call for Papers – 2024

The deadline for submission to the AAR Annual Meeting’s Political Theology Unit is February 29 (at 5:00pm American EST).

The Way to Save a Life

Yet this “good news” – profoundly strange, even apparently morbid – promises that, in relinquishing our supereminent concern for the self, pursuing instead the way of peace and justice, we become so free that even a violent end may be an expression of an ultimately joyful reception of the gift of life – that is, it may be the way to save a life.

The Fierce Urgency of Butler’s Future is NOW!    

As literary works of speculative fiction, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) thrust us into an all-too-near future, offering a haunting perspective on what our world could entail by the year 2035. In 2024, however, Butler’s Parables are no longer mere imaginative forays into the future.