In his final book, Why Niebuhr Now?, the late John Patrick Diggins exposes what he claims are false appropriations of Niebuhr and offers in their place Niebuhr’s critique of power. It is this insight, says Diggins, that is especially needed today. This is a significant argument, one worth discussing. And so we asked two scholars, Elliot Ratzman and Ron Stone, to help us launch the conversation.
This essay is part of a book series on Neena Mahadev’s Karma and Grace.
The lived practices of Afro-Bolivian farmers invite not only a philosophical reinterpretation of vulnerability but also a rethinking of Catholic social thought. Their adaptive and relational forms of life disclose a theological reconfiguration of Catholic political theology.
The society of commodity producers that Marx described continues to expand its mystifying in a world that commodifies all things, including the eucharist, the activism of indigenous communities, and the future.
I am interested in this sense of the ordinary, ongoing strike. This humble strike—not necessarily modest but rather close to the ground—could involve a politics of refusal and boycott, where those terms could be understood not only as negatives, but also as holding space for a new international community, and thus connecting explicitly something already connected or entangled in practice.
What might it mean to learn from the past now that time has moved on and “the past” now refers to a bygone era of liberal hegemony?
Has there been something fundamental to political theology that has made it a more convenient environment for men, and less so for women and non-binary people? What specific concepts, intellectual structures and paradigmatic convictions have made this specific field such a manly business?
God provides a reminder: whatever reforms might take place in the formal leadership structure, God is going to keep favouring those outside that structure. The centre might expand, but God’s preference for the margin is not going away.
He was on a lifelong pursuit to understand the deepest structures and meaning of existence, along with the place, purpose and destiny of the human being in it. He was troubled by existence. He found it difficult and challenging to understand, liable to so much delusion and perversion.
Recent work in the fields of affect theory, especially in the fields of decolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies, have shown how the necessity of attending to affect and temporality in ways that move beyond traditional accounts that prioritize inner states over exterior practices.
Compost is a living,breathing site of transformation from death to new life. While the following insights from liberation theology may not be articulated in the same way today or fifty years hence, their molecular substructures live on in their fertilization of theological re-visionings that are born of struggle and affirm the liberating primacy of life, love, and solidarity.