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Search: the Politics of Scripture

Response to George Shulman

We are all indebted to Shulman’s important delineation of prophecy’s role in American thought, especially in relation to race and redemption.

Humanism

Gilroy’s “planetary humanism” contributes to political theology by offering more than a critique: in his work, humanism is a starting point, a concept to guide multicultural political projects today.

New Political Theology Journal Leadership

The journal Political Theology announces its new leadership structure, welcoming three new editors and a new assistant editor.

Sovereignty

Where state sovereignty as theology would have subjected groups accept their condition with its attending violence and suffering, the micro sovereignty I propose here – not merely as a futuristic idea, but more as a reflection on how subjected groups have dealt with subjection – invites us not to accept that violence and suffering, but to find creative ways out of it through the cracks of Empire.

Critical Theory for Political Theology: From Theorists to Keywords

We launched this series to make available theoretical resources that keep pace with the concerns raised by those working with political theology today, whose interests are increasingly tied not only to questions of genealogy, speculation, and political modernity, but also to questions of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, ecology, labor, finance capitalism, and economies of affect. 

Lauren Berlant

Berlant is our preeminent contemporary theorist of how intimate practices bleed into and with national formations, and condition specific and powerful fantasies for what a good life or functional society would involve. To read their work is to become attuned to a set of dynamics that can be excavated in any given scene: the attachments being made and unmade, the forms of belonging that flash up and dissolve, the feeling-worlds that mediate everyday life, what remains unfinished.

Confronting the Existential Crisis of Political Theology

The rise of political theology in the twenty-first century is correlated to the eclipse of liberation theology in the twentieth—but recent works by Michael Hogue, Adam Kotsko and Karen Bray suggest the emergence of a futural theopolitics challenging the sacred/secular binary.

Perspectives on Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“Christianity redounds to its own political economy, first by making economy a general feature of creaturely existence and second by relating the kingdom of God to the economy of God, speaking of God’s reign as God’s grace. Racism and racial capitalism—epitomized but not exhausted by white supremacist Christian religion—are distortions of God’s kingdom and economy, rejections of divine rule and divine desire” (Asian Americans and the Spirit of Capitalism, 15).

Political Theology, Volume 22, Issue 8 Is Now Available

The journal Political Theology has published volume 22, issue 8.

Salafi Piety: A Story of Radical Rupture

This post examines the Islamic movement that most explicitly patterns itself on early Islamic history –Salafism – and the way in which its distinctive social practices are fundamentally indebted to modern questions and challenges of visibility and social performance.

CFP: Catholic Re-Visions, a new blog

The Center for Political Theology is launching a new blog that interrogates the relationship between Catholic theology and political theology! Please consider submitting a symposium proposal.

The Multiplicity of the Premodern Islamic Tradition

The school of Talal Asad has identified virtue ethics as the primary model constituting the continuity of premodern Muslim thought with movements of the modern period. But is this model really the most characteristic common denominator of premodern Islamic thought?