xbn .

Essays

The Affirmation and Confusion of Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday confronts every community that confesses Christ. The king who enters Jerusalem does not resemble the rulers people had learned to recognize. He does not arrive with armies or weapons. Instead, he embodies a kingdom grounded in humility, service, and reconciliation.

Memory, Obligation, and the Illiberal Jew

“Balthaser’s history is a helpful necessity. Without it the obligation has no shape, no lineage, no proof of its own non-marginality. But memory cannot be the ground of the obligation, only its occasion.”

Glissant on Religion: A Conversation

Reading Glissant is important because he not only asks us to think about political life in terms of public speech and activity, he also reminds us always to situate that politics within the landscape and the seascape.

Fragile Grammar: Natural Law and the Discipline of Authority After Catholic Social Teaching’s Universalizing Turn

In presenting natural law as an inscribed a priori, CST circumvents difficult questions about whose reason discerns this law, which historical mediation informs its articulation, and what constitutive exclusions its putative universality has required.

Daniel Bensaïd and the Islamic Headscarf Controversy

As an indicator of national frustrations, the headscarf crystallizes the collective hysteria of a declining power that clings to its dreams and its extinct splendor.

Settler Colonialism Reshaped All of American Religion

Samuel Hayim Brody interviews Tisa Wenger about her new book, Spirits of Empire

Freedom of Religion, the American Way

I will explore the covenantal relationship between statehood and religion and its implications for freedom of religion for religious institutions unaffiliated with white Christian Nationalism.

Rejecting Death: Bodies are not Commodities

If the words of Paul sound harsh, it is because they are–and I am glad that they are. To those who treat other people as bottomless vessels for pain, Paul delivers these rebukes: “This is not lawful. This does not please God. Christ is not in this.”

Remembering Eduardo Mendieta (1963-2025)

Mendieta was an erudite, critical, generous, and compelling bridge-builder between critical theory, religion, and other fields who signals a path forward.

On the Necessary Revolutionary Slowness

In an era of shrinking democratic space, Bensaïd’s prophetic pathos cuts through both quietism and theatrical revolt, demanding a radicalism patient enough to build and urgent enough to act.

Hegseth’s Death Cult

Our dear brother Pete calls himself a “Christian” and is titled the “secretary of war” today. But when it comes to real faith and realist politics, he is woefully adolescent.

The Montage of Privation: Islam and the Architecture of Sinicization in China

Islam in China is going through a period of architectural amputation called Sinicization. The result is a haunting landscape where dome-less and minaret-less mosques visualize deficiency as a definition of what it means to be Muslim in China today.