Hannah Arendt argued that interreligious difference and Christian theology are steady influences on political movements, action, and thought.
Puar reads Palestine not as a state of exception, but as something considerably more potent. As I read it, Palestine emerges rather as a theater of biopolitical experiment, in which control societies test out, through varying styles of life-halting or -inhibiting violence, the modes of regulation proper to surplus populations.
In our times when critical thought is suspect and even scientific facts have become articles of faith in need of defense, to play the double bind between the ethical and the political is the constant task Christians and others must continually engage in. This play contains serious risks, no doubt. What gives grace its generosity and generative capaciousness also makes it liable to be the locus of opportunism and oppression.
Please join the Political Theology Network for a special roundtable on Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption on June 1st at 4-5:30 PM EST
There is the rising emergence of a new breed of women protesters in Hong Kong—women who are fearless in the face of escalating brutality from the police and authorities. They remind us of the women in Galilee in the Gospel who were so brave and caring and overcame community pressure and even the fear of execution.
Meillassoux’s thinking of post-Copernican cosmic immanence and cosmic delegitimation constitutes a challenge to political theology as still predominantly Ptolemaic in its assumptions and focus
Pentecost does not present us with the ideal of the uniform, homogeneous community, but with a divine power that traverses all of our differences. God’s will is to unite us in our diversity, not to extinguish it.
The emplacement of fear and terror in the soul is what I am calling the maiming of psychic life. It is this sense of injury that extends Puar’s moving account of the violence suffered by Palestinians as they are transformed into a debilitated population to what secular sovereign power enacts on Muslims, Arabs, and “Muslim-looking” bodies writ large.
The coexistence of numerous means of resistance in Hong Kong underscores the limitations of the violent/nonviolent dichotomy, pointing out that achieving social change is not either peaceful or militant but can be both, depending on the context. It also raises questions to Christian theologians and ethicists regarding the justification (or perhaps critique) of coexistent ways of resistance in facing authoritarian regimes.
Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between “religion” and “politics” (terms he opens to question), Talal Asad urges attention to shifts in the grammar of concepts across different situations.
Rather than read it prescriptively to justify my own identification as a “righteous Christian,” I now read this passage for what it is: a poem that describes the resilience of a people who found true comfort and safety in God, despite attacks from those who would cause them harm.