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Essays

“When shall we be free?” Conceptualizing Freedom in Orthodox Christianity

The primacy of the inner type of freedom can produce a withdrawal from the world or an attitude of passivity towards its frustrating circumstances, particularly when the believer searches for real freedom exclusively inside the self irrespective of the conditions that exist in the broader socio-political environment.

Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero’s feminist theory of nonviolence takes the biblical commandment of “Thou Shall Not Kill” as its starting point. This commandment is ethical (it is about one’s relationships with others) and religious (it is about one’s relationship with God), but it is also political (without it, political communities cannot exist).

The Power You Have

Our problem is neither that we have power nor that we lack power. Many factors outside our control determine how much power we actually have. Our problem is that we fail to recognize the power we do have so that we can steward it well.

On the Work of Mourning in Muñoz

Pointing out and giving space to the melancholy at the heart of Muñoz’s work may help us rethink what queer scholars of religion, race, gender, and sexuality are doing and what we might want to be doing.

Who Are We, the Palestinians?

This essay is a backward journey to beginnings, belongings and theological political anxieties.

Pentecostals and States of Exception

Where these elements at Azusa Street helped believers create a sacred liminality that transcended racist law, in Pentecostalism today the Holy Spirit is often co-opted to anoint pastors as sovereigns who occupy states of exception as God’s anointed.

Frank Wilderson III

Wilderson doesn’t use the term “zombies” in his work. But his afropessimist stance includes a set of concepts—social death, gratuitous violence, sentient (but not living) existence—that could be easily applied to any episode of The Walking Dead.

Communities of Confession

How do we repent in a manner that is concrete and substantive but does not risk re-hurting those whom we have wronged? James’s notion of confession together in community offers one possibility.

The Power of Little Cockroaches Insisting on Worlds Otherwise

After a year when too many of us have mourned the tragic and untimely losses of loved ones (and raged at our governments for their roles in exacerbating these crises), I found another perspective on grief and change in Muñoz’s depiction of otherwiseness and a fable about a cockroach.

Is There a Secularocene?

If modernity is the Anthropocene and if secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then it is natural to ask: did secularization engender climate change?

PTN Dissertation Writing Group for the 2021-2022 Year

PTN Dissertation Writing Group seeks new members for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe’s work excavates the legacies of colonial reason and violence shaping the powers of death in the world today.