In friendship, Jürgen says, we experience a “broad space” in which we can expand. The power and beauty of the letters between Kelly and Jürgen lies, in part, in the fact that they occupied a wide space that encompassed radically different social locations.
How would the politics of atheism be enriched and deepened by attending the perspectives of children? And how might making space for children shift our conceptualizations of ‘the political’?
Is revival time a kind of queer time? The suspension of quotidian time during a revival event makes possible a queer time and place, but this possibility must be held in tension with the experience of openly queer people at Asbury, whose presence at the revival caused a furor in the conservative media.
Recent work in the fields of affect theory, especially in the fields of decolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies, have shown how the necessity of attending to affect and temporality in ways that move beyond traditional accounts that prioritize inner states over exterior practices.
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.
Méadhbh McIvor, special projects editor, interviews Erin K. Wilson on her book Religion and World Politics: Connecting Theory with Practice. They discuss how her book “tries to move us away from this surface-level essentialist thinking about religion and provide people with a practical guide for how to incorporate religion into analysing world politics without over- or under-emphasising its importance.”
PTN will convene a reading group on Stuart Hall’s thought.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Jesus’ work becomes our own through this adoption, and we are entrusted with God’s legacy to embody, to live, to pass on.