Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History serves as an invitation to uncover a multiplicity of traditions, perspectives, and forms of agency that embrace discontinuity and tension while resisting closure, and the essays in this symposium function as an active experiment in precisely this type of endeavor.
For political theology, we might find ourselves compelled by practices that seek to connect us with our ecologies, our communities, and our relations with ourselves – in ways that are more about humility and provisionality than finding cures or solutions.
While the Judahites were the recipients of physical violence, they only had the power to return rhetorical, fantasized violence. They were forced to entrust actual retribution to other powers: to God, and perhaps to the Persians (envisioned as God’s agents).
In keeping with the Center’s focus on scholarly and public engagement with issues at the intersection of politics and religion in the United States, we invite reflection on Weil that considers her thought in dialogue with religious life in the US. Please send your 500-word abstracts on Weil and political theology to Fannie Bialek and Ben Davis by November 15, 2022.
Early modern Indian saint-poets challenged the hierarchical caste-based Hindu social order by democratizing the sacerdotal ritual tradition. Food commensality was an effective means used for undertaking such democratizing processes.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Charles Mills’ death. To commemorate his life and the 25th anniversary of his influential work, The Racial Contract, we invited scholars to respond to the question: How has The Racial Contract helped you think in new ways about the connections between religion, theology, and politics? Here are their reflections on Mills’ legacy in their own work and beyond.
A truly progressive society is one that is able to feel the wounds and pain of the most marginalized and excluded. Such a society’s task, consequently, is to heal and anoint the wounded. Perhaps, that task is better undertaken by embracing the work of mourning.
People need structures to believe in, to focus their hopes and fears on – and when those structures disappear, the rupture can be disturbing, as those energies quickly get re-configured around something else.
In the end, we think that this collaboration of journals has produced an interdisciplinary exchange that deepens and complicates categories of race, equality, citizenship, and belonging that are salient in different ways to the fields of Law and Religion and Political Theology.
The conversation about nature’s personhood and rights is always political, often legal, and sometimes theological. Most importantly, it is a localized conversation about the boundaries of a given community – who is part of the community and who isn’t.
The God of Israel does not get so caught up in the national agenda that God neglects the prayers of individuals in pain. The best antidote to politics-as-usual is proper worship. Praising YHWH can keep our feet flat on the floor. As we worship the God who sees and the God who acts on behalf of the downtrodden, we seek to become like God. YHWH, rather than the human powers that be, becomes our model. In worship we become attentive to the things that God attends to, such as the grieving woman whose empty cradle signals an uncertain future.
That structural violence is always also relational, proximate, and personal is, perhaps, one of the core insights that the concept of mourning brings to the fore for political theology.