While, convinced that the thinking of nature reached its apogee in nineteenth-century German Naturphilosophie, philosophers and scholars in the humanities abandon it for being historically limited and treat it with disdain as an anachronistic remnant of hierarchical reasoning projected onto the world at large, new studies in theology show that nature is anything but an outdated concept. On the contrary, it breathes with the promise of a future, notably the future or the futures of the past, of what nature will have been.
Despite meeting all the eligibility criteria, Peter and the men disciples did not regard the women and mother Mary to be considered for this new post of apostleship. They were looking to choose ‘one of the men’ who would meet the criteria.
Compost is a living,breathing site of transformation from death to new life. While the following insights from liberation theology may not be articulated in the same way today or fifty years hence, their molecular substructures live on in their fertilization of theological re-visionings that are born of struggle and affirm the liberating primacy of life, love, and solidarity.
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 and blog posts we have published on questions of apocalypse and the apocalyptic.
John proclaims that our trust conquers the world and makes us victors…Trust implies relationship rather than transaction or exploitation. For John’s audience to be people who trust (and who are trustworthy) means for them to see others as people rather than problems.
The question then is not so much: “Can providence be liberative?” but rather, “How might liberation be understood as God’s providence?”
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…