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.
“‘I think that the ways that we move through time and space and objects move through time and space connects us…They can occasion a kind of connection.’ It is ‘our tender care’ for these objects, not merely their proximity to violent suffering, that transforms them into sacred objects.”
As Puar illustrates, debility ensures future sources of profitable capacitation in the name of liberal democracy and liberal rights bearing subjects. I am interested in what can be gained by attending to religion in this constellation, with the goal of further elaborating the dialectic of material and belief that engenders debility.
The late public intellectual Stuart Hall, with his concept of the conjuncture, assists political theology in analyzing our current moment and potential interventions.
This special issue on Mennonite political theology showcases interdisciplinary contributions from Mennonite feminist theology, Christian approaches to cultural conflict, queer literary studies, and historical critics of violence.
What if we saw in Psalm 98 a longing for an abolitionist vision of justice? How might entering into the psalmist’s vision of a joyful, praising creation animate and free our collective vision of how we might live together?
The biopolitics that Puar chronicles is not bent on elimination but rather on producing and measuring excess in order to extract value from it, in order to incorporate and use whatever remains in a project of ever-expanding control and validation of Israeli state legitimacy.