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Essays

Christ, the (Subversive) King

If Christ is King, he takes on that role in order to subvert dominant understandings of power and its exercise. Christ turns power and kingship upside down and uses them for new and much more creative and life-giving purposes.

Pious Disjuncture and the Discursive Condition

Formulating a rigorously historicist approach to contemporary cultures of Islam can build on Asad’ pivotal concept in The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam: not the “discursive tradition,” but the discursivity of tradition. Already implicit in its reiterative tradition, the modernity of Islam consists in the reconfigured powers of discursivity beyond discourse.

Political Theology and the Democratic Paradox

This post focuses on a no less important but less visible cluster of questions about the relationship between ethics and politics, what helps or hinders the formation of persons capable of undertaking liberative projects with and for others, and how the quality and character of relations between persons (for example, virtues such as hope, courage, or hospitality) directly shape the conditions for the possibility of democracy.

What Wink Got Right: The Church’s Practical Embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount

Wink presents the original contextual meaning of Jesus as also a timeless meaning. He tries to draw from the bible a clear and simple message—one that contains everything necessary for contemporary Christians to take a stand for nonviolence.

CFP: Catholic Re-Visions, a new blog

The Center for Political Theology is launching a new blog that interrogates the relationship between Catholic theology and political theology! Please consider submitting a symposium proposal.

Sara Ahmed

Scholars and activists cannot rely on fact-checking or dry reason in this political climate. We have to feel our way toward change.

The End of a World is not the End of the World

Jesus’ saying about the destruction of the temple gives us a way to view human structures as the powers they are but also as provisional—as all human things are.

Genealogy and Tradition as Methods in Islamic Studies

As Talal Asad’s notion of a discursive tradition has become a mainstay in Islamic Studies, how has it contributed to the larger debate on continuity versus rupture? And how does Asad’s anthropologically-informed definition of Islam shed light on the tension between genealogy on tradition?

Ghostly Presences and Hindutva 2.0: An Interview with Anustup Basu

The Hindu nationalist project is out-and-out an Orientalist one. It is not indigenous. It is inspired almost entirely within a colonial, Orientalist framework of knowledge.

Walter Wink’s Blind Spot: Passivity as Resistance

I am sympathetic to what I perceive as Wink’s larger goal in this interpretation. He wants to remove the option of reading Jesus’s words as endorsing toleration of abuse. He is rightly aware of and duly burdened by too many examples in the history of Christendom in which the powerful have used a command like “do not resist evildoers” as a rationale for submission to injustice.

Gil Anidjar

While Carl Schmitt claims that the enemy constitutes “the political,” his various writings largely ignore the historical and discursive evolution of the enemy. Anidjar’s major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna.

A Widow’s Presence

In her very presence, the widow performs the political act of bringing to light oppression and injustice. Our task is to learn how to see her.