As we enter a new election season with our polarized political communities occupying different epistemologies and worlds, it remains an open question what it will look like for us to cultivate a better politics. We are caught in a riptide, being pulled further apart with few resources at our disposal for anything other than the zero-sum game we’ve inherited. The Jonah story, however, offers a different kind of political imagination, where God confronts and offers grace to enemies by putting them into contact with one another. This multi-layered grace introduces moral complexity and political uncertainty, but it also opens the door to a world not entirely determined by scarcity and competition.
“I am the sum total of a thousand years of misery and striving! You may have given us this broken immortality, but I will be the first to die without fear!”
Bread is given to satisfy not only material hunger, but also to respond to emotional, political, and spiritual hunger: it expresses a desire for fraternal and sororal relationships, a desire for the Other.
“We gestate each other, even daughters and mothers, around the spool of time not the lineal thread.”
Édouard Glissant’s political theology appears in Poetics of Relation. His idea of “a modern form of the sacred” shifts how we understand ethics and human rights.
Who produces American history textbooks? Beyond historians’ work, this question demands a reckoning with political partisanship that creeps into the publication process of history textbooks. A comparable phenomenon can be traceable in ancient textualization of sacred memory. Acknowledging political forces in knowledge production helps renegotiate one’s perspectives on sanctioned discourses of historical memory in modern and ancient worlds.
The Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua died on June 14. We invited scholars of Jewish studies, literature, and politics to reflect on Yehoshua’s significance and legacy.
The best place to begin in bringing theology and anthropology closer together is with someone who did not write as if the two were separate, even opposed disciplines. Zora Neale Hurston carried out ethnographic fieldwork on behalf of Franz Boas, and yet, writing in multiple genres, articulated a theological vision that meshed the universal God with particular human experience: “Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.”
Psalm 36 reminds us that hope is grounded in God’s very nature, that it rests in the hesed of the LORD. Today, despite the fact that the work we undertake remains unfinished, we can rest in God’s hesed.
Wisdom’s words of judgement are not for others; they are for us. Wisdom has called and we have refused. She has stretched out her hand, and we have not heeded.
While some white American converts to Pentecostalism in the early 1900s were experiencing a resurgence of Jeffersonian populism of that era, Mexican nationals were living through revolutionary upheaval of their own. And like the older populism of American evangelical lines, the Mexican revolution’s radical populism was also agrarian, influenced by Jacobinism, and hostile to establishment elites.