John Perry’s recent book “The Pretenses of Loyalty” offers a clear, penetrating, and persuasive diagnosis of the predicament of contemporary liberal political theory through consideration not only of its present tensions, but more importantly, of its amnesia regarding its historical foundations. I say clear because Perry’s exposition is tightly focused, lucidly written, and structured so as to ensure ease of understanding. By missing no opportunity to repeat his main thesis and the key issues at stake, he walks a fine line, to be sure, between assisting and insulting his readers, but ultimately avoids the latter in my judgment. The diagnosis is penetrating because it does not rest content with surveying the ongoing contemporary conflicts between politics and religion and the critiques marshaled by communitarian theorists such as Michael Sandel and Stanley Fish—though he does this admirably in the first two chapters—but digs right down to the historical roots of liberal theory, the amnesia of which, he argues, is largely responsible for its present predicament….
The author of Ephesians is addressing the conflict between Jew and Gentile Christians (“the cut/circumcised” and “the uncut/uncircumcised”). The politics of this text could be boiled down to the first century conflict between these two groups. It’s a definition so basic and so simple that it belongs in a Politics 101 course. Where it gets interesting, however, is not how one defines the conflict, but how the author of Ephesians deals with it…..
Priests, in order to become mayors, had to be viewed as lovers. So, the mayor-priest is a ‘lover’ in multiple senses. He has to embody God’s love. He has to perform paternal love. He has to signal to society that he is also, very likely – albeit in secret – to be a good sexual lover as well.
Jean-Luc Marion waded into political discourse with his 2017 book Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment) which uses aspects of his phenomenological and theological project to argue for a model of non-political politics: one based exclusively on the perfect will of the Triune God.
The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.
Seva lends itself to easy appropriation across political and religious contexts, while also furnishing mutually intelligible tropes of service, welfare, and social betterment.
Diaspora might be a problem for political progressives for the very reason that it is so alluring. Diaspora promises both freedom and connection: freedom from national borders or the essentialisms of race and language, connection between people who affirm shared memory and heritage.
But heritage is never really free.
Hannah Arendt argued that interreligious difference and Christian theology are steady influences on political movements, action, and thought.
Andrew Suderman argues that the significance of protest lies in challenging the “policing” realities of death that plague our world and exposes the contingencies on which such logic rests whilst reasserting our own political agency by re-claiming the power we have to embody now the future God desires for this world. This is the form of politics to which Jesus calls us.
A central feature of political theology is to expose the problematic ways in which modern political thought attempts to suspend or conceal religious and theological frameworks and, conversely, the ways in which religious and theological belief and practice is itself a mode of political and economic governance
