This essay invites readers to consider what white Catholics reveal about the history and meaning of the term “law and order,” and what that turn of phrase reveals about twentieth century Catholicism in the United States.
The horror stories threaten to overwhelm us. But what can we do? How can we employ the Catholic mission of these institutions to slow down and reverse the corporate takeover of Catholic higher education?
The Brink, the blog of the journal Political Theology, invites proposals for symposia that expand conversations about political theology in the direction of the comparative, the colonial, the postcolonial, or the decolonial.
Signifying a critical homology between the fields of Black studies and political theology, gratuitous violence is an important keyword for interrogating how religio-political concepts can afford unique insights into issues of slavery, race, and the human which continue to inform our world today.
Luke 15:11-32 serves as a warning instead of model to imitate.
For Muslims to become worthy of any empathy and solidarity, whether in the west or in staunchly anti-Muslim India, what must first be shed is our very religiosity. Islam is to be tolerated only when reduced to culture in which the dominant-caste or white friend can joyously celebrate Muslim festivities, visit Muslim friends and restaurants for biryani in Toronto or Delhi, or post Sufi songs on their social media. Those are the parameters set around reception of a Muslim sans Islam.
While noting earlier scholarly debates over the connection between monotheism and political theology, I pose the question of how the discourses of political theology might look different if these discourses were to become more pluralist and less focused on European and biblical traditions.
This post considers how the purportedly “secular” state strategically deployed “Catholicism” in its imperial actions abroad and how those reverberated at home. The Central Intelligence Agency found Catholicism to be a useful ideological ally in the struggle against communism during the Cold War, raising up anticommunist, conservative, and largely white US Catholics as ideal citizens at home to support their use of Vietnamese Catholics as anticommunist allies abroad.
To express it very simply and briefly these are the Paul Ryan Republican Catholics who would look askance at anything like even a mild Bernie Sanders kind of socialism. The problem is that Sanders is more aligned with official Catholic teaching on the common good than is the former.
Abolition is a process of imagining alternatives to the settler colonial, carceral present; it requires modes of kinship and care to replace prisons and policing.
Against the prevailing conception of populism in Western democratic societies, Argentinean political theorists Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia rearticulate the meaning of populism from the perspective of Latin American political reality. In their book Seven Essays on Populism (Verso 2021), Biglieri and Cadahia invite the readers to reconsider populism as constitutive of the political.
Using the example of nineteenth-century “Americanist” archbishop John Ireland, and his boarding school initiatives in Minnesota, this essay demonstrates how the US Catholic Church came to behave as an American institution by seeking common ground with liberal ideals of freedom, while simultaneously embracing state policing and punishment against populations marginalized from the body politic.