Essays

What would it look like to consider identity-based oppressions—queer marriage blessings and women’s ordination—as interrelated symptoms of a need for structural, ecclesial changes?

Like authoritarian regimes throughout history and around the world, threats to cultural and political power are leading many on the Christian Right to fear declining national birth rates and promote traditional gender roles and having more babies for “the nation.”

The following conversation between Jashodhara Sen and Kanu Halder took place on May 24, 2022. The discussion focuses on Halder’s research with the Matua, in which Halder evaluates Matua progressivity and political consciousness.

A preliminary question for political theology is how to understand the meaning and significance of matter. The response to this question shapes how a political theology does or doesn’t engage political economy and theological tradition.

The theo-political impulse of this parable is this: one needs to address the inequality of perceptions that manifest both in society and sacred places.

Whereas Smith’s work on excess refuses metaphysical or conceptual capture, Alex Dubilet expands the philosophical logic of excess as undergirding a critical praxis.

Queer Catholics live outside of the Church’s vision of the good life. Let us imagine what queer holiness looks like.

White Christian Nationalism is being actively transformed into a theo-political program – and a grave threat to American Democracy.

Above and beyond the heartache that recent events in Iran engender among Muslims and people who are in solidarity with us, it harms what we truly and communally care about: finding creative ways to reassert who we are and what we stand for.

If theorizations of care are to more directly address the current “crisis of care,” we need not only to prioritize the kinds of embodied, particularized care that care ethics has highlighted in the past, but to explore a wider range of caring relationships and their diverse structures.

In the book of Genesis, after the changing of Jacob’s name to Israel, no one calls him by his new name. Instead, the name “Israel” seems to exist as his “true name” and Jacob as his “use name.” “Jacob” is the name that everyone calls him, but he knows that “Israel” is who he really is inside. God has named him “Israel,” and consequently, this will become his legacy.

Queer, I think, should remain different, differing, dissonant, and plural. It shouldn’t contract or calcify into anything singular or solid.