This essay outlines an ontological form of atheism to suggest novel ways to conceptualize political theology and forms of socio-political praxis. An atheism of indifference is offered as a means to resist the theological framing of socio-political issues.
Both books evoke a sense of nature that likewise challenges and transcends conventional notions of creation as a passive, static object of divine activity. They do so by having nature engage with and even touching on the divine, or at least creating the conditions that allow such a touch to happen.
From the mid-19th century, African American atheists have been central figures in the Black Freedom Struggle. Their political activism was oftentimes explicitly motivated by their atheism and has provided an important example to contemporary Black atheists and humanists.
If Jesus is a vine, can we really accept a theology which permits us to sit back and take without contributing anything ourselves?
Liberation, caught between queer nihilism and eschatological certainty, must seek an third way beyond the binary of hopefulness and hopelessness through the negation of both. It must transpose itself into an apophatic register as the experience of continual failure, an uncertain endless becoming, that might be called simple hope.
Mutual knowing is not a given in relationships…
What if Liberation itself must be liberated? Or maybe, like the nonperson and the nonbeing, it has always been breathed into by the breath of white violence.
Access to the sacrament of the Eucharist has been weaponized against all those the church deems unworthy, immoral, or in sin. The sacrament that was meant to be a way of knowing and encountering the risen Christ through breaking and sharing of bread has been made into its opposite.
If we are to hope for anything beyond the end of hope, it is in the incommunicable and incommensurable nature that is the moan.
The journal Political Theology will host an event on “Palestine and Political Theology” April 4 at 2pm eastern.
The unity embodied in this psalm is idealistic, imaginative, and radical, embodying fluidity. It disrupts the exclusivist notion of nationalism common in its contemporary literature and embraces unity, which is symbolized as inherently good and pleasant.
Fifty years after the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, what, if any, relevance does Christian liberation theology and Gutiérrez’s work have for our present moment? Do we still have a memory of a liberating God? And if not, is there a liberative power in grappling with the absence of this memory?