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.
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.’
This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.
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?
This essay makes a strong case that the social, political, economic and ideological developments that accompanied the transition from the Heian (794–1185) to the Kamakura period (1185–1333) generated epistemic and social structures of a longue durée that remained permanently available as a resource for a Japanese form of secularity.
Sin exists in the denial of love and compassion. Where there is justice, there God’s work is seen. It is the absence of love and denial of fellowship with one another that defines sin. Being Christ’s disciple is building a just society by loving one another and creating a safe space for everyone to live in. The Church should be a welcoming place where everyone feels liberated and not judged based on differences or otherness
The Center for Political Theology will be hosting a book launch for The Politics of Ritual on March 16, 2023 at 4:30pm in Garey Hall 10A, Villanova University. Please RSVP to denise.farrell@villanova.edu.
We have a history of commentaries that paints real physical need—experienced by billions worldwide daily—as stupid ingratitude. If we ask YHWH for literal water, pleading with him and testing his provision, are we being unappreciative?
The prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon (Ecumenical Patriarchate) passed in Athens, on February 2, 2023.
The idea of the modern secular presupposes the existence of a holistic premodern world in which the amorphous phenomenon of religion penetrated all realms of life. But the existence of an Islamic distinction between the religious and non-religious domains suggests otherwise: not a latent secularity, but rather a difference of an altogether different kind. But if it is not equivalent to the “secular,” then what is it?
Early medieval people could and did differentiate ‘religion’ from ‘not religion’ when it suited them to do so. These secularizing strategies are no less historically significant for being situational and often fleeting.