The business of religion, to use that unfortunate turn of phrase, is to change the world. The theo-political implication of radical democracy is that we cannot wait for a God to save us. If democracy indeed is the political instantiation of the death of God, then this is a task that is ours alone.
At this moment of extreme political intensity, Paul W. Kahn’s new book, Political Theology, appears as a timely meditation. By means of a sustained engagement with the controversial German legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s text of the same name, Kahn attempts to demonstrate that behind our seemingly liberal, constitutional order is a deep faith in the sacred character the state and of popular sovereignty. One is tempted to read Kahn’s juxtaposition of the discourses of (liberal) political theory and political theology as a commentary on struggle between the Obama Administration and the contemporary Republican (and Tea) Party—the one stressing reason, deliberation, pragmatism, compromise; the other embracing faith, will, power, sacrifice. Kahn, however, is more subtle than that. His slim volume is a provocative, sometimes frustrating, sometimes perplexing read, providing much food for thought, and also, I can imagine, for fights.
In “A Public Faith” I offer a sketch of an alternative to totalitarian saturation of public life with a single religion as well as to secular exclusion of all religions from public life. I write as a Christian theologian to followers of Christ. I am not writing as a generic religious person to adherents of all religions, a project that would fail from the start. To stay with the example of Qutb, it is a task of Muslim scholars to elaborate distinctly Islamic alternatives to Qutb. My task is to offer a vision of the role of the followers of Jesus Christ in public life, a role that stays clear of the dangers of both “exclusion” and “saturation.”
The attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon threw the debates over the definition of “religion” into a stir. Though religion was obviously a central factor in the events of 9/11, overly phenomenological and essentialist construals of religion were suddenly and starkly at a loss in making sense of how and why.
This speaks to a division in our politics, a separation of policy from the profound. President Obama sounded like a technocratic Ronald Reagan – optimistic that we can out-compete emerging nations.
Debt forgiveness was not an act of discretionary charity but a matter of divine justice — a God-ordered liberation of persons and families crushed by debt and indentured to creditors.
Psalm 2 presents the ways in which the powerful paint themselves as simultaneous victor and victim–and, more hopefully, it depicts a God who interrupts these fictions.
This essay is part of a book forum on Immaculate Misconceptions by Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones.
True hospitality is not simply about offering occasional charity or gestures of kindness but about dismantling the structures that prevent full participation in community life. It requires courage to challenge entrenched systems of exclusion and to imagine social bonds not as transactional exchanges but as expressions of shared humanity.
Lydia does not need a man or any other figure of authority to speak for her or to dictate her life. She is her own agent and even Luke-Acts’ Paul has to respect that. She cares for her own, commits to seeking justice, and makes her own choices.
You might be forced to accept your place in a fundamentally unfair world, but you should never take the next step to allow the values of that world to become the values that shape and give meaning and purpose to your life
Imagine a world in which we stop at every news of death. Imagine a world in which we do not trivialize or rationalize death. … Have we over-theologized life after death?