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Search: Dead Sea Scrolls

The Politics of Water: Exodus 17:1-7 (Timothy Simpson)

Israel’s experience of thirst in the wilderness should draw our attention to the experience of those for whom thirst and lack of water is a reality of life in our own day. We must identify and address some of the ways in which we are complicit in the forms of injustice that produce such a situation.

Piracy, Politics, and Proximate Justice

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.

On the Ubiquity of Entropy

The novel questions whether “real life” is more real than “half life” and thereby becomes an allegory for how the “other world” of religious imagination colonizes “this world”. Dick constructs the relation between the “real world” and the “other world,” between immanence and transcendence, according to the psycho-dynamics of revealed, monotheistic religion.

<strong>Free for the Taking: Susan Taubes and the Lure of Literature</strong>

How much freedom can literature offer? Is the act of interpretation complicit with mastery and violence? This essay suggests that these questions are at the heart of Taubes’s novel Divorcing.

Disciplinary crossings

Why are anthropologists and theologians drawn to each other? What are they seeking?

Blackness

If there is one thing that can be said about blackness, it is this: blackness is unruly.

On the Work of Mourning in Muñoz

Pointing out and giving space to the melancholy at the heart of Muñoz’s work may help us rethink what queer scholars of religion, race, gender, and sexuality are doing and what we might want to be doing.

Who Are We, the Palestinians?

This essay is a backward journey to beginnings, belongings and theological political anxieties.

Frank Wilderson III

Wilderson doesn’t use the term “zombies” in his work. But his afropessimist stance includes a set of concepts—social death, gratuitous violence, sentient (but not living) existence—that could be easily applied to any episode of The Walking Dead.