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Essays

Jean-Luc Nancy

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.

Christianity Unreconciled with Wealth

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.

How Does It Feel To Be Seen As Needing a Cure

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.

Reflections from Summer 2021 Emerging Scholars Gathering

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.

“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.