How fickle friendship can be. After all the years of close co-operation, the dinners out together, the help we provided, and the dirty work we did for them, its come to this.
Yesterday I was a reformist; today I’m a war criminal. Mubarak, Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Saleh, I feel your pain.
The vision of God’s kingdom espoused in Isaiah 61 seems more “not yet” than “already.” Jesus identified the first two verses as a prophecy regarding himself, the Messiah, when he read from this chapter in Luke 4. In spite of Christ’s commitment to the least of these, large segments of the Western church insist on spiritualizing Christ’s mission so that it focuses on poverty of spirit or spiritual blindness—an interpretive move that allows injustice to persist unabated and unthreatened by prophetic witness.
It is unfortunate that the mainstream evangelical church owes its political stance more to John Stuart Mill than to Jesus. The members of many churches worship American individualism and the free market more than the ethical responsibility for the “other,” as encouraged by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and ultimately Jesus himself. In On Liberty, Mill defends the rights of individuals to behave as sovereigns over themselves as long as others are not harmed. Unfortunately, many Christians have adopted this perspective, and the government is viewed as an oppressive behemoth bent on snatching away private liberties. What is not mentioned is that our individual economic decisions are often destructive to the overall well-being of fellow citizens.
Four scholars discuss their books published for the Transforming Political Theologies book series.
Zahi Zalloua responds to Benjamin Davis’s review of his new book, To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian (2026)
The Catholic Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost explores the contradictions of incarnation in ways relevant to contemporary discourse between Catholicity, political theology, and transfeminism. By engaging with the carnivalesque and Freud’s uncanny, I will apply the story to conversations about trans inclusion in Catholic communities.
For those witnessing today’s televised violence and mass destruction, the collapse of meaning renders nihilism seductive. Can the collapse of meaning be resisted?
This essay is part of a book forum on Immaculate Misconceptions by Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones.
Translating Senghor’s political writings shows the continued relevance of Negritude in the conceptualization of political community in the wake of the encounter between Africa and Euro-America. However, framing the translation, like engaging any of Senghor’s work, ought to pay close attention to his African critics.
This article delves into Walter Benjamin’s epistemology, focusing especially on his perspective on art and historical reflection.
Violence here is not the symmetric flipside of speech. While destroying the semblance of peaceful normality, the violence of Palestinian armed struggle “communicates” on a political and epistemic level: it violently makes violence visible.
The joy of Christmas is always mixed up with the grief of the world’s suffering. One need only look today at the very town the magi came to visit.
What happens when kings and rulers are confronted by a child whose very presence boldly proclaims that God is with us? Sometimes children have an astounding ability to disrupt the status quo. They resist passivity and compliance, they dream boldly and they demand justice. Who are our Immanuels today? And what do we do when we encounter them?