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Essays

Past the Horizon: Speculative Fiction and Political Theology

Political practices have more in common with literary techniques than one might assume. In reflecting on how we build worlds to inhabit, political theology can draw on sources and themes from speculative fiction to help us imagine ourselves beyond the structures we inhabit.

The Significance of a Derogatory Term

A derogatory term, “freedom cunt” uttered against a female is offensive, but it is also instructive.

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard’s thought as it appears in Le Différend describes a linguistic state that evades speech, and the ways in which justice could be done to it, or not. Bearing witness to unpronounceable utterances brings about the idea of faith.

Tracing Debility and Webbing Resistance to State Violence through Crip Epistemologies

Using Puar’s line of analysis, we can trace how debilitating trauma can become a tool of the nation-state that creates racialized “mad people”: unruly, distressed, unbecoming, disposable in the eyes of the nation-state, yet necessary in their precarity and correct-ability.

Reasoning about (Non)violence in the Hong Kong Protests

It is not always clear what we mean by violence or nonviolence, though, like pornography, we assume, we’ll know (non)violence when we see it.

Catherine Malabou

To read Catherine Malabou is to embark upon an adventure of thought. Her writing demands change from her readers if they are to follow her on that adventure. It is a process of change that is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful.

Indigenous Identity Caught Between Being the Devil and A Hard Place

The politics of identity often has Indigenous persons grappling with the dichotomy of US empire’s labels of the Native American Indian as contaminating evil or contaminated victim. For Indigenous Christians Jesus calls on us to spurn these limiting designations, to embrace the spirit of interdependent creation, which brings us back to a family of justice and life.

We’re Hiring: ASSEMBLY podcast co-hosts

The Political Theology Network (PTN) seeks two co-hosts who are enthusiastic about developing our ASSEMBLY podcast!

Temporality, Asphyxiation, Debilitation

I am struck by the resonance of this notion of asphyxiation, of debilitation as asphyxiation, which makes sense not just to think about debilitated populations in the United States and Palestine/Israel, but also other populations too, in spaces ruled, albeit in different ways, by the logics of neo-liberal capitalism and biopolitical security.

The Demonic in Hong Kong

We need to recognize the tragic aspects of the events, in which the perpetrators of evil are themselves grasped, enslaved, or “possessed” by demonic powers as structures of evil.

PTN Event: Political Protest, Theological Dissent, and the Orthodox Church

Please join the PTN event on “Religion and Freedom in the Post-Communist Orthodox World” co-sponsored with Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center