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Essays

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.

Disownment and the Discourse of Death

To be personally acquainted with disownment and the discourse of death—simultaneously, from divergent communities—and still desire to be “servant of all” is, perhaps, one way to journey through death on the Way. Nevertheless, Jesus’ teaching to love neighbor and enemy is both beautiful and horrible, not unlike the Christ’s foretelling of his death on the way to resurrection.

In Convivencia, a Reflection on The Sense of Brown

This piece features a multimedia reflection on José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, which emphasizes the text’s radical approach to imagining solidarities and social relations beyond the normative paradigms of identity politics and its permutations. Through both textual poetics and sound design, Wadud and Lázaro Moreno riff off Muñoz’s own performance-based approach to storytelling and meaning-making, engaging Sense as an invitation to reconsider the aesthetic and philosophical terms of community-making, centering the power of counterintuitive methods.

Remembering Tyler Roberts (1960-2021)

The Political Theology Network community remembers Tyler Roberts, who died on June 3, 2021 at the age of 61.

Pilgrims or Settlers? Pentecostal Politics at the Crossroads

Pentecostals’ political commitments reflect processes of memory and amnesia, assimilation and identity… the stronger the memory of sojourning, migration and exile, the healthier the entrails of compassion for the soujourner’s wellbeing; the greater the distance from the memory of a wandering past, the greater the buy-in to a nationalistic Malthusian ideology that, among other things, paints the sojourner as law-breaking menace to the host society.

Julia Kristeva

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach and practice shed light on the unconscious, affective, and bodily formation(s) of religious and political discourses and systems.

Wisdom’s Judgment

Wisdom’s words of judgement are not for others; they are for us. Wisdom has called and we have refused. She has stretched out her hand, and we have not heeded.

PTN welcomes new managing editor

PTN announces John Boopalan as its new Managing Editor.

The Trump Shall Sound: Politics, Pentecostals, and the Shofar at the Capitol Riots

Almost a quarter of a century after that night in Pensacola, Trump supporters brought their shofars to a “Jericho March” at Washington D. C. in a manner resembling that decades-old revival meeting. Like the Brownsville attendees who cheered for Gideon’s victory, the Jericho March called to mind a biblical story of Joshua at Jericho, another conquest with the sound of a shofar.