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Essays

Hope, and Hard Boards

Psalm 36 reminds us that hope is grounded in God’s very nature, that it rests in the hesed of the LORD. Today, despite the fact that the work we undertake remains unfinished, we can rest in God’s hesed.

Application for Political Theology Network’s Dissertation Workshop, deadline extended!

PTN invites Ph.D. students who identify as women or gender nonbinary to apply to the PTN Dissertation Workshop with a special emphasis on “(How to do) political theology without men?” The deadline to apply is now February 1!

Attuning the Church, Debating What Lies Beyond Racial Capitalism

The true gift Tran has given us is a theologically provocative understanding of the church as a certain kind of deep economy. I will be thinking with it and learning from it for a long time.

The Politics of Touch

Both in Jesus’ baptism and in the later giving of the Spirit through the laying on of hands in the early Church, we see significance accorded to touch. This importance given to touch—to the tangible—summons us into the realm of human and bodily connection and engagement with others.

Defending Racial Particularity within Tran’s “Deep Economy” of Grace

Racial identity as a source of cultural, political, and personal pride predates the North Atlantic slave trade; therefore, racial identity must be part of the calculus when articulating a theological anthropology.

Remembering the Good News

Following Jesus the Dao in flesh is to follow the way of liberative freedom, a freedom to embrace the openness of Jesus’s multifaceted witness instead of reductively boxing him in by way of the Logic of the One.

PTN 2021: The Year in Review

The PTN Executive Committee looks back on multiple PTN initiatives throughout 2021 and looks forward to many new opportunities in 2022.

The Prophet, Pigmentation, and Pottersville

When we think about Christmas, do we associate it with charity or justice? Christmas certainly appears to be associated with charity in our larger culture. In contrast, Isaiah 9:2–7 reminds us that the lectionary readings for the season consistently focus on justice.

A Relational Ethic for a Fragmented World

The story of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus is nothing but the story of people fleeing the violence of an authoritarian empire, though the glitter and celebration of Christmas may have muffled the brutal reality of migrants and refuges seeking sanctuary from death. It is in the midst of such imagined Christmas that the veracity of homeless migrants dying in choppy waters and people stuck in border detention camps waiting for a new future gives us a reality check. The violent empires may have faded but their legacies linger on.

Mary the Prophet

Despite the limited historicity of this text, I like to think that it is the Magnificat, not the fiat, which shows why Mary was the mother of Jesus. It takes a prophet to raise one.

Political Theology, Volume 22, Issue 8 Is Now Available

The journal Political Theology has published volume 22, issue 8.

Destabilizing Divine Presence, Fracturing Joy

What if Zephaniah’s addressees had a right to mourn, lament, and rage against the wrath of Yhwh? Afterall, Yhwh’s favor is fickle in Zephaniah, entirely contingent on a particular obedience and only coming after the divine wrath is spent.