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Essays

<strong>A Decolonial Reading of the Post-Resurrection Event</strong>

Since the risen Christ embodies the gift of hope for those who follow the post-resurrection Christ, our reading of the Johannine narrative on the encounter between the risen Christ and the followers ought to open our hearts to encountering difference as an opportunity to replicate the gift that the followers received – openness to difference as the means by which God chooses to make God present in our world.

Political Theology Network Conference: Call for Papers

We are pleased to invite proposals for the 2023 Political Theology Network
conference.

Binding Berlant

The burgeoning subfield of queer and trans studies in religion is opening up avenues for understanding our bodily attachments within and beyond religion. With Berlant’s sensibility as a guide, scholars of queer and trans studies in religion might seek to explore the paradoxes of desire and love that Berlant theorized with a generosity, curiosity, and clarity we can all hope to emulate.

Supra Confessionals in the Medieval and Early Modern Persophone Zone

What catalyzed the supra-confessional move in the post-Mongol Persophone zone, and what did it leave in place for the ideologues of Iran’s 1979 revolution—another watershed regularly misattributed to confessional tenets—to cultivate and propagate?

Wilderness Kingdom

There can be no coherent concept of home, it would appear, apart from borders and boundaries that at once enclose and exclude. This suggests that those without a home … somehow exist beyond the insider–outsider binary that the rhetoric of “home” delineates.

Feminist (Theological) Fantasies

Berlant’s work points us to other possibilities that avoid, that resist, the fantasy of redeemed gender—calling for us instead to reside in the messiness of our attachments and providing space and ways for us to negotiate them, rather than seeking to transcend them. Whereas the efforts to transcend gender seem to, paradoxically, deepen our attachments to gender norms, it is also the case then that in negotiating the messiness of those attachments, one finds space for other ways of doing gender that perhaps subvert or move us beyond its constraining norms.

From Hosannas to the Cross

The pairing of Jesus’s celebrated entry into Jerusalem with the story of his Passion by many churches this Sunday presents a kind of emotional whiplash. It offers a warning to how we treat the prophets and revolutionaries of our own time.

The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.

Inhabiting queer religiosity

Drawing from ethnographic research of Indonesian Muslim queer experiences, this essay addresses Lauren Berlant’s conceptual legacy in understanding tensile relationships between queerness and religious affects.

Did medieval Christian Europe really produce early forms of secularity? 

Some narratives about secularization and modernization processes which include pre-modern history still tend to postulate a trajectory of an early emergence of secularity in Europe, particularly in the form of a separation of church and state beginning during the European Middle Ages. But more recent findings suggest that medieval Christian Europe remained quite comparable to other cultural constellations: Rather than a secular sphere, political dynamics produced demands for the de-politicization of religion, or at most, situations and social spaces of ‘neutrality.’

Pussy Riot and the Church

This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.

The Sleepers Must Awaken

We are a people once asleep, now waking to a new world, where our forms of life have done irreparable harm to our earth and helped to unleash a deadly pathogen on ourselves. We must ask, how will these bones live?