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Essays

Lament As Subversive Prayer

In the voices of the oppressed, one can listen to the voice of the divine. In this decolonial reading, one can excavate a liberative hermeneutic, which is life affirming and life nurturing. The lament of Hagar and her son Ishmael are echoed today in the voices of several people who are excluded in the society by the dominant, and the call for us today is to listen to the divine and work for a just world. 

<strong>Free for the Taking: Susan Taubes and the Lure of Literature</strong>

How much freedom can literature offer? Is the act of interpretation complicit with mastery and violence? This essay suggests that these questions are at the heart of Taubes’s novel Divorcing.

From Servitude to Service

The laws at Sinai are no ball-and-chain, implementing a new form of slavery. They express the practical dimensions of life in freedom, the boundaries within which the nation can experience a life-giving form of service to the One who graciously rescued them from servitude. In short, they are revolutionary.

<strong>Death of an Author</strong>

Readers who insist on interpreting Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing as a veiled autobiography misunderstand the novel’s radical irony.

The Problematic Blessing of Occupied Land

I want to pretend that the “land flowing with milk and honey” was in fact an unoccupied land—a specially preserved paradise, just waiting for the Israelite people to discover it. But, unfortunately, we all know the rest of the story.

Political Theology Conference 2023

Registration is now open for the upcoming Political Theology Conference in Philadelphia, PA, September 7-10.

The Nonbinary Creation

The fact that people use Genesis 1 as justification for all of this hate is not only horrifying and appalling, but it’s also, simply put, WRONG. The creation thrums with life purely because God’s love makes it so.

Living the Dream

Pentecost isn’t simply about the dreams of old men or the prophesies of children; though, these, certainly, are a part. Pentecost is about living the dream.

Inspiration—being filled by the spirit, is not about dreaming dreams or seeing visions, it is about living them.

In Memoriam Ranajit Guha—Anticolonial Political Theologian

Ranajit Guha had helped establish the Subaltern Studies school, and thus moulded the birth of postcolonial studies and non-Eurocentric global history. Guha was both a critical chronicler of the longue durée theological foundations of state and capital, as well as a bard of the ancient heritage of revolt against these structures of oppression.

<strong>Reclaiming Negritude in African Political Theology</strong>

In his book Senghor’s Eucharist, introduced here, David Tonghou Ngong focuses on Senghor’s poetry collection called Black Hosts as a starting point for understanding his political theology. He argues that Black Hosts is a Eucharistic theology that calls for the reclamation of the Eucharist for the remaking of the world.

The Ascension and the Politics of Endurance

Contending against the dominion of sin and death requires the same wisdom and willing vulnerability that characterize Jesus. Exemplifying both of these characteristics means seeking a solidarity with the world’s plight while simultaneously refusing to assimilate to its norms of greed, selfishness, and domination.

Political Theology Network Conference: CFP Extended!

An updated date and call for the PTN Conference stream “Naming the Anthropos in Anthropocene: A Political Theology of (Hu)Man” has been released. See the call here.