God’s recurring appearance in Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing confirms the work’s alarming in-sight about the seductions of patriarchal authority while also dramatizing fiction’s imaginative power.
Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.
Registration is now open for the upcoming Political Theology Conference in Philadelphia, PA, September 7-10.
The following includes an introduction and an excerpt from an interview by Prashant Keshavmurthy (Associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at McGill University) with Dalpat Singh Rajpurohit (Assistant professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin). The discussion features Rajpurohit’s new book, Sundar ke svapn: ārambhik ādhuniktā, Dādūpanth aur Sundardās kī kavitā (2022).
“Jesus’ “I am the way” is an opportunity for Christians to demonstrate the path of love to people…it doesn’t warrant any exclusion or hatred towards the other…”
As Catholic Re-Visions welcomes two new members to its leadership team, the three co-conveners sit down for a conversation about their backgrounds and the blog’s direction.
The burgeoning subfield of queer and trans studies in religion is opening up avenues for understanding our bodily attachments within and beyond religion. With Berlant’s sensibility as a guide, scholars of queer and trans studies in religion might seek to explore the paradoxes of desire and love that Berlant theorized with a generosity, curiosity, and clarity we can all hope to emulate.
Berlant’s work points us to other possibilities that avoid, that resist, the fantasy of redeemed gender—calling for us instead to reside in the messiness of our attachments and providing space and ways for us to negotiate them, rather than seeking to transcend them. Whereas the efforts to transcend gender seem to, paradoxically, deepen our attachments to gender norms, it is also the case then that in negotiating the messiness of those attachments, one finds space for other ways of doing gender that perhaps subvert or move us beyond its constraining norms.
Some narratives about secularization and modernization processes which include pre-modern history still tend to postulate a trajectory of an early emergence of secularity in Europe, particularly in the form of a separation of church and state beginning during the European Middle Ages. But more recent findings suggest that medieval Christian Europe remained quite comparable to other cultural constellations: Rather than a secular sphere, political dynamics produced demands for the de-politicization of religion, or at most, situations and social spaces of ‘neutrality.’
This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.
This forum reflects on the intellectual legacy of the late affect theorist Lauren Berlant, who passed away in 2021, for queer and trans studies in religion. Berlant once claimed they had nothing to say about religion – but our contributors disagree.
This essay makes a strong case that the social, political, economic and ideological developments that accompanied the transition from the Heian (794–1185) to the Kamakura period (1185–1333) generated epistemic and social structures of a longue durée that remained permanently available as a resource for a Japanese form of secularity.