In an age when nothing is sacred nothing is more difficult to understand than violations of sacred space. Yet that’s precisely what Mark demands of us in his account of Jesus’ first public action, an exorcism in the synagogue.
From the moment Jesus sets foot in the religious and political center of Capernaum, he is engaged in a contest with the scribes over authority concerning that space itself and all that it represents. It’s clear from the beginning that his audacious move catches the attention of everyone. The people notice: “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22).
In the October 13 issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner published a critique of the Bush administration’s policy on torture, under the title “Our State of Exception”. He didn’t give Carl Schmitt (or Paul Kahn) credit, but he could have. When the intellectual history of the past generation is written, one of the stranger items will be the unexpected resurrection of a sinister figure who might have seemed buried and forgotten, except for his admirers on the far right wing of respectable discourse.
Benjamin Davis responds to Zahi Zalloua’s review of his new book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (2025).
We don’t need scholars to tell us that Jewish radicalism is something of the past, dead, buried, and long forgotten. The world already tells us that every day. We need articulations of Jewish radicalism for today that activate its legacy.
Inspiration comes from previously off-limits traditions, just as emotions once dismissed as despairing gain untold potentials: this is the turn from leftist melancholy to melancholy politics.
From Colombia to South Africa, from a decolonial stance to trauma theory, these scholars have offered polysemous approaches to the political as well as the theological.
Kings and rulers often justify themselves through their pedigrees. Jeremiah’s political hope, however, does not rest on elite politics. It rests on a policy of righteousness for all.
Ranajit Guha had helped establish the Subaltern Studies school, and thus moulded the birth of postcolonial studies and non-Eurocentric global history. Guha was both a critical chronicler of the longue durée theological foundations of state and capital, as well as a bard of the ancient heritage of revolt against these structures of oppression.
The Center for Political Theology will be hosting a book launch for The Politics of Ritual on March 16, 2023 at 4:30pm in Garey Hall 10A, Villanova University. Please RSVP to [email protected].
“Across all classes and strata, Bengalis live this double existence – we live like Don Quixote.”
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Charles Mills’ death. To commemorate his life and the 25th anniversary of his influential work, The Racial Contract, we invited scholars to respond to the question: How has The Racial Contract helped you think in new ways about the connections between religion, theology, and politics? Here are their reflections on Mills’ legacy in their own work and beyond.