In likening kingdoms lacking justice to criminal syndicates, Augustine invokes the story of a confrontation between Alexander the Great and a pirate. Indeed, Augustine judges “that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor’” (De civ. Dei 4.4.1).
For the family of the late Trayvon Martin, Saturday’s ruling – that George Zimmerman was found not guilty of any wrongdoing in his shooting of Trayvon – is a terrible tragedy, and a miscarrying of justice, compounding an already vast sea of grief.
This theological dimension, which does not exclude messianism but coexists with it, is not new to Zionism and has been present in it from its inception; articulating it will therefore contribute not only to understanding the history of Zionism, which is far from being as peace-seeking as it often tells itself, but also to understanding the wide Israeli support of the genocidal war on Gaza.
This essay is a storied and theological proposal for non-violent, disruptive anti-fascism.
The White House report on the Smithsonian is not a correction of the historical record but a theology of it, reviving the covenant grammar that once made conquest read as providence. Against its demand for absolution without confession stands the one act that actually costs: returning the dead.
By dealing death on dark life, whiteness and white supremacy reveals itself dangerously asleep, and so liable to divine judgment. Black life, alternatively, is already “awake” with the illumination of a future reality in which the dead things are brought back to life.
If we want to experience the full effect of Easter, we must recognize that it’s not just about Jesus…it sends ripples through the cosmos as it signals the dismantling of worldly kingdoms built on exploitation and invites us to participate instead in a social order that reflects God’s intentions for the flourishing of all.
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Paul’s “Flesh/Spirit” dichotomy is not an overly-spiritualized, anti-body othering (i.e., a devaluation of the body against supposedly holy disembodiment) but an ethical cleavage with profoundly political repercussions.
“[These books] exhibit the fruits of decades of scholarship urging us to engage a wide variety of Catholic subjects and to allow for the strangeness of religious experience, and yet at the same time contribute so clearly to older strands of work on intellectual and political history.”
