By opposing the political to the mystical, we risk missing Woolf’s theopolitical reach.
These devastating times and the repeated actions informed by the continued propagation of supremacist ideals may seek to drive us into hopelessness and inaction, but we know this is not the end. History reminds us that promoting an “us vs. them” thinking is destructive to all, including the earth.
When Israel fights Hamas, very little is left for Mizrahim and women, but these two domestic Others of Israeli society are there as a form of resistance to the globalized lexicon of “War on Terror.” Both enable conceptualizing Gaza also in domestic terms, as another Israeli periphery.
Rather than starting from a diagnostic superficiality of her image, a seemingly inevitable lure as evidenced by the myriad books about Weil that display her photo on their cover, when we really dwell with Weil’s writing in relation to her self-fashioning, what emerges is how profoundly she sought a more engaged connection with the world.
Those experiencing rejection because of their sociopolitical identities can know that God does not condone discrimination, that God’s promises are a proclamation of reversal.
The Kingdom of God – the kingdom pictured in Psalm 72 – seems a long way off, a dream growing more distant everyday as we move inexorably closer to the inauguration.
This is a salutary call to counter the provincialism of narrow focus in individual fields (Classics often falls in this trap) by expanding the scope of study beyond any single culture.
In being used as a weapon, American Jews—even those who resist state power—find ourselves imbued with a power we did not want, playing a role for which we did not audition. Rather than gifted with a second sight, we are caught inside a hall of mirrors.
In the post-secular world [Dick] envisions, religion has fully capitulated to the allure of the marketplace. As these perky commercials are meant to indicate, Dick expects humankind, circa 1992, to seek (and find!) redemption not in its devotion to (and fear of) otherworldly deities, nor in the afterlives these deities gatekeep for their favorites, but in its reverence for nifty consumer wonder products: beer, brassieres, plastic wrap, razors, etc.
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Many foundational myths of community formation and development situate “after the storm” as the moment when positive change began to happen for them as a people… Isaiah 53:4-12 can be understood as an act of collective storytelling to imagine life “after the storm.”