In Esposito’s most explicit political theology work, he is concerned with re-working, or rather destabilizing, the essence of political theology.
The question I would like to pose this week is whether a theophany of the kind that we find in Job 38 would satisfy people—the aggrieved, the hurting, the oppressed, the battered—as a response to political tragedy.
This week, the Political Theology Network remembers and mourns the passing of Dr. Albert Raboteau (1943-2021).
Contemporary African political theologies are a study in contrasts. A prophetic strand challenging unjust politics is alive and well, but so are political theologies that align with unscrupulous politicians and seek wealth at the expense of ordinary people. This dizzying situation raises questions of both substance and method about what African political theology is and how to do it.
The idea of opposition then is not about establishing a negative position for its own sake. Instead, to embody opposition here is to draw a line, and this line constitutes a limit-experience. It as if to say, ‘enough is enough.’ So, this opposition is an ending and a beginning.
The subtlety and poetry of Nancy’s language can mask the rigor and the urgency of his thinking. I hope to share that rigor and urgency here, particularly as it relates to global capitalism, Christianity, and ontology.
Is wealth the opposite of Christianity? Is profit antithetical to the kin-dom of God? A look into Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli’s accounting process – now called reconciliation accounting – reveals that despite Jesus’ words, the practice of Christians in the Western world has emphatically answered: no, they get along just fine. It is high time for a Christianity, guided by Mark 10:17–31, that is unreconciled with wealth.
Reading The Sense of Brown has made the work of our collective, What Would an HIV Doula Do? less ineffable to me. While I do not think that brown and HIV are analogous, I do find thinking about the brown commons, and our HIV collective alongside each other instructive.
As six emerging scholars met over summer 2021, the overarching theme of the workshop—the state of the field of political theology—presented both an opportunity for and obstacle to meaningful conversation.
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.
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).
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.