As a corrective to their corruption and total misconception of God’s character, Micah puts forth the disposition God requires – the triad to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
Violence here is not the symmetric flipside of speech. While destroying the semblance of peaceful normality, the violence of Palestinian armed struggle “communicates” on a political and epistemic level: it violently makes violence visible.
The ongoing attempts to control both narrative and people after Renee Good’s killing are examples of what Paul Virilio describes as endo-colonization. It has very deep roots.
On Democratic Disagreement as Ethical Formation
This Third Sunday of Epiphany is a celebration of light breaking into darkness, but as I write, my friends and neighbors are reeling from the death of a legal observer—shot and killed by a federal agent blocks from my home.
Against the backdrop of Gaza and Europe’s muted response, this essay reflects on Elad Lapidot’s challenge to recognize the violence hidden in the language of peace.
Whenever someone tries to become an absolute sovereign, to make oneself “King” or “God”, such an act of sovereignization brings about the de-sovereignization or in-sovereignization of everyone else.
Eventually, we all need others, leaving cooperation, humility, and patience the only lasting realities of human access to power. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that power can abandon any of us, at any moment – even and especially on a debate stage, in full view of the entire planet. We all forget this lesson at our peril.
The ability or inability of insiders to hear the silences that arise on the other side of the borders drawn by colonizing societies around themselves, to perceive them as the echo of missing voices, may constitute, for the victims of colonialism, an indication of whether they can place their hopes for a more just world in something other than violence.
Negativity cuts against a politics of nostalgia (which seeks to conserve the imagined glories of the past) and apocalypse (which rejects the world as irredeemably compromised)