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Essays

Chaos, Community, and Creativity

Our reception of Genesis 1:3 emphasizes the inherent power of God’s word, not only to improve lives but also to change (and create!) new structures. Just as God once brought order from chaos, God can do so again.

Paul’s Propertied Incarnation

Those who read Paul’s propertied incarnation in Galatians should not run away from its horrors or theologize them. We should find truth in them (though perhaps not the truth Paul intended). We should tell truth from them.

Reading The Magnificat as a Member of the Empire

In the face of systemic injustice, it is difficult to hold space for a desire for peace and the knowledge that empires usually outlast the people who protest against them. While it may be tempting to shut down at feelings of powerlessness, the Magnificat gives us another option. We can be like Mary and the generations before her, singing and hoping and praying for change.

The World Turned Upside Down

Mary, an unmarried peasant girl, is pregnant. Though scarcely an intimidating figure, her words in the song ascribed to her in Luke’s Gospel—known as “The Magnificat”—ought to make those of us who are privileged people stop to think, if not to fear.

Waiting as a Spiritual (and Political) Practice

The author of 2 Peter maintains that in order to wait well one must place trust in God and God’s promises (3:13). What sets a follower of Christ apart in the communities to which this epistle is addressed is that they do not act according to their own interests, or even their own timeline, but rather, in accordance with the promise of God.

Intimate Association Beyond Secular Time

“I am the sum total of a thousand years of misery and striving! You may have given us this broken immortality, but I will be the first to die without fear!”

Advent is a Time of Learning the Skill of Waiting

Hope orients one to look beyond the horizon of suffering and to see the resilient light of new beginnings.

Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies

From the perspective of political theology, the presence of Indigenous peoples and settlers shaped by historical and ongoing settler colonial relations raises important political and religious questions about the possibilities and conditions of sovereign Indigenous existence and the (im)possibities and conditions of restorative or reconciled settler futures.

The Political Romance of Clay and Air

“Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air is the air of the steppes.”

The Potential of Creative Misinterpretation

Perhaps the tension between honest reading and creative liberatory “misinterpretation” should not be solved at all but rather retained as an unsettling force in our work.

Fantasy and the Prophetic: A Response to The Golem and Jinni

“Dreams come true, in fantasy novels and in prophecy”

Political Theology and Related Units: AAR/SLB 2023 Conference

The following post contains information that may be of interest for those attending AAR/SBL in San Antonio this year.