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Essays

Trustworthy Testimony

The capacious and eternal love of God is neither a verifiable fact nor an opinion, but a theological truth-claim, staked on trust in Jesus as a credible witness. Christians who believe in such love should be wary of both the politics of condemnation and the politics of purity.

Towards a Balkan Theology of Political Liberation

The Institute for Theology and Politics (ITP) is conceived to be a generator for establishing the first Balkan, i.e., post-Yugoslav contextual theology with a political-theological and theological-liberation orientation.

Whose Sword?

Psalm 149 is not a blank check for our passionate pursuit of personal vengeance. Quite the contrary! It places a sword in the hand of only those who have recognized YHWH’s ultimate kingship.

Cultivating Justice and Hope amid Different Worlds: An Interview with Silvana Rabinovich

Following this path, I intended to do a non-punitive reading on Cain’s wandering by presenting it as God’s opportunity to cultivate the land while moving around the territory. This view of the nomad seeks to rehabilitate another type of relationality with the Earth by recovering its dignity in different horizons.

A God who Liberates

The Exodus event and the liberation of slaves from Egypt is not only the foundational story of Israel’s identity, it is also meant to be the key to understanding who God is in Hebrew Scriptures. Let that liberation be how the world continues to hear the name of God, today.

<strong>“War” in The Time of The Rebellion: Between Colonial and Decolonial Narratives About Malabar of 1921</strong>

This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography of Malabar rebellion, in which “war” (“yudham”) and “riot” (“lahala” or “mutiny”) were configured on the model of “politics” and “religion”. The post asks what kind of sovereign formation was imagined in such a narrative strategy and why it needs to be addressed.

Theorizing Domination Itself: Philosophy, Organizing Movements, and Vincent Lloyd’s <em>Black Dignity</em>

The need for rigor in our organizing movements is clear. The obverse of this is also true: there is a deep need for struggle in our philosophy.

Tyranny is Nothing New (Nor is Resistance)

Through confrontational or subversive tactics, God empowers human agents to restore God’s liberating and salvific will for the creation.

<strong>History, Memory, and the Everyday: Life in the Time of Rebellion</strong>

This article demonstrates how the living memories of Malabar rebellion evade the logic of the historical narrative. The native memory of the rebellion appears to have subverted the neatly drawn schemes such as ‘Hindu’ vs ‘Muslim’, ‘cruelty’ vs ‘compassion’, and ‘horror’ vs ‘fascination’ etc. that animate the logic of historical writing.

What is Mystic-politics?

The word mystic-politics (misticopolitca) is meant to indicate a field of experience that can no longer be contained in rigid compartments. It indexes on one hand mysticism and its internalizations, while on the other politics and its activism.

Breaking Barriers from Our Background

We all learn ways of negotiating life from our histories, families, religions, and our broader society. These passages suggest that some of what we learn can be deadly to our siblings and our neighbors, but we can explore different visions of God and abandon the toxic ways of thinking that are so often deeply embedded in our world.