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Search: the Politics of Scripture

The Bat Mitzvah Immersion: Rippling into Adulthood

“We gestate each other, even daughters and mothers, around the spool of time not the lineal thread.”

Political Theology Adds New Editorial Team Members

The journal Political Theology announces new members of its editorial team.

Command/Commandment

The modern state form itself is inextricable from the commandement, not just as an emblem for sovereignty in Schmitt’s sense, but also because the exemplary political form of modernity, the nation-state, has racist and exclusionary tendencies that can be understood as political-theological transfers of monotheistic principles.

George Shulman’s Letters on Political Theology

This symposium celebrates George Shulman’s work on political theology by continuing the conversation that formally concluded when Shulman’s “Political Theology” seminar met for the last time in the spring of 2021.

Who is Afraid of Allah? On Muslims Sans Muslimness

For Muslims to become worthy of any empathy and solidarity, whether in the west or in staunchly anti-Muslim India, what must first be shed is our very religiosity. Islam is to be tolerated only when reduced to culture in which the dominant-caste or white friend can joyously celebrate Muslim festivities, visit Muslim friends and restaurants for biryani in Toronto or Delhi, or post Sufi songs on their social media. Those are the parameters set around reception of a Muslim sans Islam.

Feeling fresh, feeling novel: What Charismatic-Evangelical Christian Practices Can Teach Us About Truth in the U.S.

Intense feeling is characteristic of Donald Trump’s political presence. The Trump rally, replete with chanting, screaming, and a long, rambling speech is an affect-laden performance. For people trained in charismatic-evangelical communities, Trump’s intense performance feels true.

Martin Buber

Meeting Martin Buber, in other words, means meeting the voice behind the words, a man who did not always know how to “recover from institutions.”

Forget Schmitt!

Political Theology Must Follow Agamben’s “Double Paradigm” of Sovereignty. The following is the guest editorial for the current issue of the print journal Political Theology (Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2018). 

Announcing PT 16.1: Theology, Plurality, and Society

Issue 16.1 of the journal Political Theology is devoted to theology, plurality and society. Below guest editor, Dr. Peter Scott, introduces the issue.
Must a religiously plural society fall apart? How does theology process plurality? This special issue of Political Theology addresses the issue of plurality from a variety of theological perspectives. It began life as an attempt to respond to an earlier special issue of the journal, which assessed critically the political and theological phenomenon of Red Toryism. In the earlier volume, there was persistent criticism of an appeal to a common tradition in the context of a religiously plural society.