. . . It all sounds so beneficial, benignly urging us towards a better life and perhaps even a better society. The problems with ‘nudging’, however, are significant, although I restrict myself to the key ones: it misses the dialectic of nature and nurture; it misses the very conditions under which nudging take place; and it lacks a proper sense of the role of reform.
Our book connects the subject of ageing with that of religion in contemporary European society. This might seem a natural association to make but in fact is largely missing in current research in both gerontology and religious studies. . . . The study of ageing in its turn has also given limited attention to the role of religious faith and practice, as well as to secular alternatives to religion, in providing existential meaning to older people’s lives.
The story of Jesus’ healing of the blind man in John 9 presents us with the politics of exclusion in operation. However, in a twist, it is the politics of exclusion that are revealed to be excluded.
The journal Political Theology is thrilled to announce twelve new members of our editorial board. With these additions, the journal continues to expand its geographical scope and to reinforce its commitment the diversity of disciplines and methods found in the field. The new members are:
Foucault’s emphasis on the ‘care of the self’ is usually hailed as a significant challenge to the understanding of ethics. With the tendency of ethics to focus on the ‘other’ and how one relates to that other, the turn to consider the construction of the subject seems to be radical. This was also Foucault’s answer to the perennial problems of ethics . . .
We would like to begin with agreement on something fundamental. The team of Mathewes and McRorie are surely correct about the persistence of nudging in our lives. We are nudged by the cereal company that pays to have its product on the top shelf. The little tables at the end of aisles in Barnes and Noble are miniature subdivisions with real estate sold to publishers. Those tiny neighborhoods of books are nudges.
The emergence of a new critical theory for the 21st century, exemplified in the writings of such theorists as Foucault, Agamben, Žižek, and Badiou as well as in such zones of contemporary discourse as biopolitics and globalization theory, has tremendous yet still uncharted consequences for theological thinking.
What political theologies are embedded in and shape Zionist and Palestinian refugee mappings of space and place? This is the animating question of my new book, Mapping Exile and Return, which stems from my doctoral studies in theology at the University of Chicago and 11 years of work in the Middle East.
In YHWH’s instructions to Israel in Leviticus 19, we see a concern for social justice and the righteous treatment of the poor and weak which has continued relevance in our own day.
Following the very useful list posted on Religion in American History, we’ve put together a list of several forthcoming books relevant to political theology to keep an eye out for as they are published in the coming months. If we’ve missed any, please share them in the comments. Come summer, we hope to have another list for you, introducing all the books due in the second half of the year.
This is a book about India and China. It is about the ways in which these nation-forms, and the nationalist understandings of religion that have thereby developed, have been transformed by Western imperial modernity.