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Essays

PTN Summer Reading Group on Stuart Hall

PTN will convene a reading group on Stuart Hall’s thought.

Asbury, Surprise, and the Fate of American Christian Nationalism

And this brings us to the aspect of Asbury that is either hopeful or depressing. Again and again, what happened in Asbury in February of 2023 is presented as first being centered around the youth and, second, as devoid of the common American strain of nationalist muscular Christianity.

Sibboleth: A Reply to Zadie Smith on the War in Gaza

In taking up shibboleth at the near end of its itinerary from “stream” to “cliché,” Smith shortchanges the capacity of this particular narrative—one of the Bible’s most memorable and disturbing myths of sovereign power—to address what is happening, now, “in the case of Israel/Palestine.”

Work, Life, and the Dissent of the Sabbath

We were not made for the capitalist subjection that characterizes our lives. The gift of the Sabbath serves us in the present by contesting work’s overlordship and disrupting the social controls by which capitalist hegemony maintains itself.

Remembering immanence: a short appeal for a good atheism in troubled times

What is the role of atheism in bringing hope to troubled times? Controversially, I/Stacey stress(es) that atheism too often reproduces the transcendence it claims to reject. Instead, bringing insights from my/his time among activists, I/he argue(s) that a good atheism must be in touch with immanence.

Living the Legacy

Jesus’ work becomes our own through this adoption, and we are entrusted with God’s legacy to embody, to live, to pass on.

Pentecost as A Graced-Gift of Disruption: What Can the Church and Society Learn from the Pentecost Experience?

Pentecost experience offers a vision of surplus that allows all people to flourish because the source of meaning and purpose for each society is grounded in a God of surplus.

Jesus as a Political Atheist

To think of this empire as anything other than wrapped up in mimesis is to think otherwise. This essay explores how mimesis has captured us all and conscripted us into its political ontology. This essay offers another way to consider being; another way to find ourselves with the introduction of Jesus as a Political Atheist.

From the Archives: Apocalypse

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Political Theology, we are diving into the journal’s archives to share highlights of what we have published. In this installment, here are some of the articles and blog posts we have published on questions of apocalypse and the apocalyptic.

Gaza through a Mother’s Lens

“Mami, when will the war on Gaza end?”… I know I should lie to my eight-year-old son like I used to.

For Another Theology of Nature

While, convinced that the thinking of nature reached its apogee in nineteenth-century German Naturphilosophie, philosophers and scholars in the humanities abandon it for being historically limited and treat it with disdain as an anachronistic remnant of hierarchical reasoning projected onto the world at large, new studies in theology show that nature is anything but an outdated concept. On the contrary, it breathes with the promise of a future, notably the future or the futures of the past, of what nature will have been.

A Political Theology of Election(s)

Despite meeting all the eligibility criteria, Peter and the men disciples did not regard the women and mother Mary to be considered for this new post of apostleship. They were looking to choose ‘one of the men’ who would meet the criteria.